


Strays

by DiscontentedWinter



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Coercion, Dark, Dystopia, Horror, M/M, Non-Consensual Touching, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Prostitute Stiles Stilinski, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, non-con elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-16
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-08-15 07:43:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 31
Words: 56,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8048128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/pseuds/DiscontentedWinter
Summary: In a Beacon Hills that's been destroyed by a war between humans and werewolves, Stiles Stilinski does what he has to in order to survive.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You may have read the teaser for this as part of Word Soup. If you know me, you'll know I couldn't leave it the hell alone.  
> I hope the update schedule will be daily - it all depends on how much I manage to get written per day. Also, the chapters are going to be short ones, since I don't want to burn myself out on this, and I still have a bunch of original fiction I'm supposed to be writing.  
> As always, I have no idea where this is going.  
> All aboard!

 

Chris shouldn’t. He knows that. Shouldn’t feed the strays, or they’ll never get rid of them. But somehow he finds himself standing outside the empty hospital, repurposed now as HQ, holding up a vacuum sealed ration pack to lure the boy closer.

Grit crunches under the thin soles of the boy’s shoes as he steps toward him.

It’s a transaction.

Bloodless.

He’s seen this kid before. The first time was staring out the back of a truck as it rumbled through the remains of the town, and the kid was standing like a wraith on the corner of what was once Main Street. The kid was silent and still. The only thing moving was his gaze, tracking the trucks as they rumbled past.

Chris wants to think there’s something different about this boy, something special enough to make him break his own rules, but maybe he’s just tired, worn down by years of war, and what the hell does it matter what he does?

It’s a transaction.

The boy is quiet throughout, wary and watchful as Chris puts him on his knees.

When it’s done, the boy slinks back into the darkness with the ration pack clutched to his chest, and Chris returns to his room and pours himself a drink. From his window, he looks out onto the remains of the town once known as Beacon Hills.

 

***

 

Stiles only truly relaxes when he’s stepped over the line of mountain ash at the entrance to the high school basement. He and Lydia spent hours sealing those lines in place with an epoxy glue they made from resin. There are certainly benefits to holing up in a place with chemistry textbooks. The boundary hasn’t been tested yet. Stiles hopes it won’t be. He likes the high school basement.

“It’s me!” he calls, voice rasping, as he heads down the stairs. It’s dark, but Stiles knows his way.

Lydia’s sitting on the pile of gym mats and fire blankets that make up their bed. The high school basement is way better than most of the places they’ve sheltered in over the past few years. Lydia is reading a textbook by candlelight, and sets it aside when Stiles appears.

He crosses over to her and drops the ration pack down on her lap.

She blinks at it. “What is this?”

Stiles sits down beside her and tugs a blanket around his shoulders. “It’s a ration pack.”

She purses her lips. “And how did you get a ration pack?”

“Duh.” He tries for a smile, but it more or less misses.

“Stiles.” Tears shine in Lydia’s eyes, but they’re short-lived. She shoves him roughly. “What the _hell_? Why would you do something so _stupid_?”

Stiles doesn’t answer that, because she knows exactly why.

“Just open it up and eat something,” he mutters, heat rising in his face. He’s not ashamed. Not exactly. He knows he did the right thing. It’s just that Stiles has always been sensitive to Lydia’s disapproval, even when they were both five years old and making macaroni craft in Mrs. Jansen’s kindergarten class. Well, Lydia had been making macaroni craft. Stiles had been crouching under the table furtively eating as much dry macaroni as he could. Lydia’s been judging him harshly ever since then.

Stiles holds the blanket closed around his neck, doubling the edge over so that his fingers don’t get cold, and watches as Lydia inspects the ration pack. She opens it like she’s opening a Christmas present, breathless with anticipation, and if Stiles lets his eyes slowly close he can almost see the soft glow of colored lights and smell the gingerbread.

“It’s been dark for hours,” Lydia says. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

“Sorry.” He’d set out in the afternoon with the aim of checking out some of the ruined houses over on the north side. They’d been shelled pretty badly during the early days of the bombardment, and Stiles figured there might still be untouched basements, if he could find a way in. Except all that had happened was he’d got chased off by a bunch of people who’d apparently been living there for months, and he’d had to backtrack so far to avoid them that he’d ended up over at the old hospital, staring at the soldiers patrolling the perimeter and wondering if he had the courage to approach them.

And then…

And then one of them had spotted him, had held up the ration pack, and…

And Stiles had understood.

“Gonna lie down,” he says through a yawn, and shuffles further back onto the mattress so he can draw his legs up and curl up like a pill bug.

“You want to eat first?” Lydia asks him softly.

“I already ate,” Stiles lies. It comes as easy as breathing. “The guy. He gave me something.”

The _guy_. Like he doesn’t know exactly who it was.

Stiles tugs the blanket up past his ears, and blinks at the familiar slope of Lydia’s back as she eats.

It’s good.

It’s good that she’s eating. They’ve had a rough few months, but Stiles feels like maybe they’re finally getting on top of things again, even though it’s just the two of them now. They’d had a good place over on Maple—a house that looked as ruined as most of the others form the outside, but with a basement that at one time had been converted into a bedroom. Jesus fuck, that had been a comfortable bed!—but they had to ditch it when it all went to hell there at the end.

And now Stiles and Lydia are the only ones left.

No way in hell was it supposed to turn out like this.

 

***

 

Beacon Hills is a misnomer. The town itself is in a shallow valley that holds the mist for hours on cold mornings like this one. Stiles feels like a ghost as he slips through the mist, his hands jammed in the pockets of the faded red hoodie he found in one of the high school lockers. He hates the feeling of the mist on his skin, cold and damp. Even more, he hates the feeling that he can’t see if there’s anything coming at him. It might be daytime, but the hair prickles on the back of Stiles’s neck like it’s night. Like he can hear the scratch of monstrous claws on the cracked asphalt behind him.

He needs to stockpile as much food as he can.

With winter coming and the days getting shorter, there won’t be as much time to find supplies. And Stiles figures that whatever unofficial claim they had on the neighbourhood around Maple, well, that’s gone now. Vanished on the wind. There are other scavengers in town that Stiles knows by sight. He also knows they won’t be above attacking him to drive him off if he’s foraging alone.

So the hospital it is, at least until Lydia can act as lookout for him again.

God, but it was so much easier when there were more of them. Strength in numbers, or whatever. They watched each other’s backs.

And now…

Now there’s nobody.

 

***

 

A few weeks ago, Jackson didn’t come back.

When Stiles and Lydia cleared out of the house on Maple, it had been in the middle of the night. Maybe they should have waited until morning, but how could they? Stiles had scoped out the high school a few weeks earlier, and shut his mouth about it. That was the rule they’d made early on. They always had a backup plan, and they always kept it secret.

“Hurry up!” he snapped at Lydia, because she was taking too long.

The moment the words were out, he knew they were the final straw.

She didn’t collapse into some teary heap on the floor—that was so not Lydia’s style. Instead, she only nodded, clamped her mouth tightly shut, and made silence her armor.

She didn’t break until they made it safely to the high school basement, and Stiles held her until she fell asleep. The next morning he woke up with his arms still around her from behind, one hand splayed protectively over her pregnant belly.

Stiles remembered a time when heartbreak meant wishing someone would come back. Heartbreak was a different sort of thing now. Jackson was gone, and Stiles and Lydia hoped desperately that he would never come back.

Yesterday Jackson was Stiles’s friend, and he was Lydia’s boyfriend.

Today…

Today he was either already dead, or a wolf.

 

***

 

Stiles remembers the hospital parking lot from when he was a little kid. He remembers the sinking sensation he felt whenever his dad pulled in here, because Stiles wanted to see his mom, but also, he didn’t. It made him feel wrong in a way he was still too young to properly articulate. Like waking up and finding the sky was red instead of blue, and knowing he’d never again be able to trust anything he thought he knew about the world.

Turns out he was right not to trust it.

Stiles approaches the entrance to the old hospital, his hands balled into fists in the pockets of his hoodie. He’s not stupid enough to get too close to the sentries at the checkpoint, but he stands where they can see him, and hopes that some of them recognize him from last night, when the major held up the ration pack and Stiles walked toward him.

He stands and waits now, while the sun slowly burns the mist away.

He doesn’t know if it’s an hour, or if it’s even longer, but eventually one of the sentries beckons him forward.

Stiles goes.

 

***

 

Chris half-expected to never see the kid again, but here he is again, turning up like a bad penny. When word reaches him that the kid is lingering outside, Chris is tempted for a moment to ignore him. He knows what the kid’s here for, and then it occurs to him that if he isn’t the one taking advantage of the kid’s willingness—or at least his hunger—that someone else will. And Chris isn’t sure if he really wants that. He’s not even sure if it’s guilt that stirs him, or a twisted sense of benevolence. He only knows that if he puts the word out that the boy is his exclusively, then it will be as good as law. And surely there will be a certain prestige attached to that? Something the boy can use as currency amongst the other scavengers and strays. There’s an element of selfishness in it as well though, because Chris doesn’t want something used and dirtied by others.

He has the boy checked for weapons, checked that he’s safe, and then sent to his room.

Chris is either a good man in a terrible world, or he is an evil man who has inherited the world he deserves.

It seems like the sort of question he might go to his grave wondering about.

 


	2. Chapter 2

“Nice,” the kid says, his mouth turning up in a wry expression too brief to be called a smile. He’s cradling his cut hand in his uninjured one. The bleeding has stopped, but the skin hasn’t knit. He’s human. His gaze travels around the room, and Chris wonders what he’s seeing. It seems spartan to Chris. A bed, a table, a couple of footlockers set against the far wall. Nothing worth writing home about, but to the kid it might be as glamorous as a palace, with its electricity and running water.

Last night Chris didn’t bring him into HQ. Just pulled him into the dark between the checkpoint and the entrance, and put him on his knees.

Chris moves over to his footlockers. He opens the closest one and pulls out his first aid kit. He beckons the kid closer.

The kid steps forward, head tilted on a curious angle.

“You don’t want it to get infected,” Chris says.

The kid looks down at his palm, and then holds his hand out warily.

Chris takes it. His hand is slender, fingers long and dextrous. The cut on his palm is only shallow, but Chris grimaces a little as he takes in the state of him. There’s dirt on the heel of his hand that looks ingrained, and lines of black grit under his bitten-down nails. The whirls on the pads of his fingers are embossed with grime.

He’s an odd choice. Too young, too thin, too filthy. Chris thinks it’s his eyes, maybe, or maybe it’s that flash-in-the-pan smile. Chris feels old, tired, and the kid is something different to that. Instinct tells Chris that a kid like this in a place like this should have had all the life knocked out of him by now, but he hasn’t. The kid is interesting. He defies Chris’s low expectations, and maybe that’s enough.

“How old are you?” he asks as he dabs the kid’s palm with antiseptic.

The kid hisses at the sting. “Um, eighteen.”

Chris regards him curiously. “Are you lying?”

“It wouldn’t make a difference, would it?” the kid asks. “So, no. Why would I bother lie?”

It’s probably a fair point.

“I can conscript you if you’re eighteen.”

The kid wrenches his hand away. “I wouldn’t join your fucking army if you literally held a gun to my head.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Chris asks, keeping his tone even.

“No.” The kid lifts his chin. “So what do you want, Major Argent? Do you want to blow my brains out, or do you want me to suck your dick again? Because those are the only two options on the table.”

There’s a flash of fear in the kid’s dark eyes, but Chris has no doubt he’s telling the truth. He might be stupid, but he’s not lying. Then again, maybe not so stupid. This is Beacon Hills. Why would the kid want to join the army that razed his town? It’s a twisted sort of logic, but maybe it’s easier to suck the dick of a man he hates to earn his ration packs instead of saluting him. Chris supposes the kid has rationalized it whatever way he can to help him sleep at night. And that’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? To find a way to sleep at night?

He lets the subject drop. “What’s your name?”

The kid regards him warily for a moment, and then jams his hands in his pockets, his shoulders loose again. “Stiles.”

Stiles.

 

***

 

Chris takes his time with Stiles. Curls his fingers in his greasy hair and makes him take instruction. He watches his dick disappear inch by inch into Stiles’s mouth. Feels his throat constrict around him, and gentles him through his sudden burst of panic with low words.

_That’s it. Good boy. You can take it._

When it’s done he gives the boy a bottle of water and another ration pack.

“I want you to come back tomorrow,” he says.

“Okay,” Stiles rasps.

Chris walks him down the stairs to the exit, and watches him go. Then he goes back to his room, reads the latest patrol reports and intel submissions, and writes a long overdue letter to Allison.

 

***

 

Stiles takes a shortcut through the remains of downtown on his way back to the high school. It’s a mistake, probably. Some days he can walk right past the bombed-out shell of the Sheriff’s Department with barely a flicker of unease. Today he can’t.

Probably…

Probably because he can still taste Major Argent’s cum in his mouth.

Stiles was ten when the war began.

Ten years old when the first of the army’s trucks rolled into town. It was exciting, he’d thought back then. Like something out of a movie. Monsters were real, and the military was coming to save them all.

Except that’s not how it happened.

For the first few weeks nothing much happened at all. Even the playground chatter at school died down after a while, and the kids got bored of playing werewolves and soldiers. Stiles’s dad had darker bags under his eyes than before, and sometimes Stiles associated that with the war, but mostly it didn’t touch him much at all.

Then the rationing started.

People got scared, and then they got angry.

Stiles remembers it all in flashes, like the opening sequence of some Hollywood blockbuster: the backstory told in newspaper headlines and photographic stills. He doesn’t remember the passage of time. He thinks that maybe he didn’t notice what was going on at first, what path they were inevitably set on. He thinks his dad probably could. Stiles can’t remember him smiling at all during those last weeks.

He remembers people visiting the house at odd hours, their voices strident. He remembers his dad’s voice, calm and pitched low. Reassuring them, maybe, or maybe cautioning against anger.

It wasn’t enough to stop what happened.

When the military tried to close the supermarket, to take all the food for themselves, some people stood in front of them. More and more people joined them throughout the day. Stiles had thought it was fun at first. Everyone standing around and talking. The people from the supermarket were handing out lollypops to the kids. The air had been buzzing with energy. Then Major Argent had turned up, and read from some declaration or something that told everyone to disperse, that the government had said this was an act of treason.

“Go home,” Stiles’s dad had said, his face drawn. “Go home, kiddo, _now_.”

“Dad, what’s going on?”

His dad had held his face between his palms. “I love you, son. Run home now. _Run_.”

Stiles had been two blocks away when he heard the shooting start.

 

***

 

After the shooting came martial law.

Nobody could tell Stiles where his dad was, because nobody was allowed out of their houses.

Stiles, ten years old, had eaten all the cereal in the kitchen over the course of a few days, and then run in the middle of the night to Scott’s house. Melissa hugged him and kissed him, and promised to look after him.

After martial law came the riots.

After the riots came the bombing.

The government made an example of Beacon Hills.

_Look. Look what non-compliance gets you. Don’t be traitors. You don’t want to end up like Beacon Hills._

Funny, but in those first few years of the war Stiles never even saw a werewolf.

 

***

 

What would his dad say if he could see Stiles now?

 

***

 

Lydia doesn’t say anything when Stiles gets back. She just takes the ration pack, and heats up the macaroni and chilli on the little portable stove they made out of stuff they salvaged from one of the science labs. It’s just a tripod, basically, with a shallow metal dish shoved in to use as a cooking surface, and a steel bucket underneath to put the wood in. Lydia sets it up on the basement steps so they don’t suffocate themselves with smoke in the meantime.

They eat sitting on one of the gym mats, and then they climb the steps to the ruined corridors of the high school, all the way up to the precarious roof where they check to see if they’ve collected any fresh rainwater in their series of mismatched containers. It’s tedious work, but it settles Stiles’s nerves a little.

When they return to the basement he flicks through a biology textbook for a while. The corners of the pages are folded down on the chapter about reproduction and childbirth. Lydia’s been reading it again, probably. She tends to veer between practical and panicking as time passes. Stiles doesn’t blame her. Okay, sure, women have been having babies for millions of years. But also, if something goes wrong, they have no way to fix it.

Jackson was supposed to be here for her. He was supposed to help her.

Scott too, and Danny.

Now it’s just Stiles left for Lydia, and he knows she must regret that. How could she not? Stiles regrets it.

Stiles curls up with a blanket around him and falls asleep before it’s even dark.

 

***

 

Chris knows a stalemate when he sees one. He knows that Beacon Hills is well and truly destroyed. He knows there’s nothing left worth fighting for. The local wolf pack hasn’t ever made an outright attack on HQ because it’s not worth the effort. That doesn’t mean Chris can afford to lose his vigilance. Every so often one of his soldiers does. Maybe strays a little on patrol. Maybe forgets to keep close to the rest of his squadron. They usually find the body a day or two later, throat torn out. A reminder from the wolves that they’re still here, still watching, still thirsty for blood.

Chris has often wondered how the humans in Beacon Hills survive, but maybe they don’t. Maybe they get their throats torn out just the same.


	3. Chapter 3

 

The ration packs are starting to stack up in the basement of the high school. Stiles wishes he didn’t have to look at them at all.

“You don’t have to go back,” Lydia tells him, but of course he does.

It will be winter soon.

The baby will be here soon.

They need to eat.

 

***

 

It’s been a few weeks. Chris could count the days exactly by the tally marks on Stiles’s skin if he wanted. Each day Stiles passes the checkpoint they cut him to be sure he hasn’t been turned. Each day Chris dabs antiseptic on the shallow cuts, and Stiles lets him do it. There’s a frailty in the boy that has nothing to do with his scrawniness, and everything to do with the way he holds himself while Chris ministers to his tiny wounds. He thinks of Allison when he does it—of scraped knees and tear-filled eyes, of little scratches and bruises that only daddy could make better—and wonders if Stiles thinks of someone in those strange, quiet moments too.

By the time Chris puts his first aid kit away the space has grown between them again. The space where Chris forgets he is a father, forgets the feels of a chubby hand clenched in his own, and becomes selfish again. Becomes weary, and demanding.

It’s a space where their interaction becomes a transaction again.

“I want more ration packs,” Stiles tells him one day. “And a first aid kid. And antibiotics.”

“You think your mouth is worth all that?”

Stiles presses his lips together tightly for a moment, and lifts his gaze. “I didn’t say it was just my mouth I was offering.”

“No offence, Stiles,” Chris tells him, amused, “but I can get mites just by looking at you.”

“Fuck you,” Stiles says, but goes down on his knees anyway.

 

***

 

The next day when Stiles turns up, Chris has a towel, a scrubbing brush and a container of antiseptic wash waiting for him. Chris doesn’t say a word. He just opens the door to his private bathroom and nods at Stiles to go in. Then, because he’s paying for the privilege, he follows him inside.

Stiles toes off his shoes and strips out of his clothes. He’s less scrawny than Chris imagined, but he’s still too thin. It’s the first time that it occurs to Chris that Stiles isn’t eating all the ration packs he earns. He can’t be.

Chris watches Stiles twist the taps on, and grimace as he steps under the hot water. The water runs gray around his feet. He scrubs a palm full of antiseptic wash through his hair, lathering it with his fingers. Then, when he’s done with that, he takes the scrubbing brush and works it over his body, removing layers of grime and leaving pink, abraded skin in its place. It must sting, but he doesn’t complain.

There’s nothing Chris can ask him to do, probably, that would make him complain. Not with the promise of ration packs and a first aid kit and antibiotics on the line. That realization should make Chris feel guilty, shouldn’t it?

It doesn’t.

He’s doing Stiles a favor, after all.

Chris returns to his room, and flicks through the latest dispatches from Command. There’s been a werewolf attack in Portland. Thousands of casualties. It’s difficult to tell if it’s a victory or a defeat from the dispatches. It’s a war of attrition, really. As far as Chris can tell, nobody is winning. He doesn’t care anymore. Allison is safe in Washington, and that’s all that matters.

He sets the dispatches down when he hears the shower stop.

A few minutes later Stiles appears, towel wrapped around his narrow hips, gaze settling somewhere just over Chris’s shoulder.

“How do you want me?” he asks.

 

***

 

It hurts no more or less than Stiles imagined it would. As far as he can tell, Argent is being nice about it. He doesn’t rush him. Doesn’t just rut into him like a dog or whatever, and maybe it even feels okay. It’s not _bad_ , and Stiles gets an erection, so there’s that. It’s just that with every touch, with every smooth thrust, all Stiles can hear over the buzzing in his skull is the voice inside his head:

_What would Dad say if he could see you now?_

 

***

 

Stiles is walking awkwardly when Chris sees him past the checkpoint at the hospital entrance. Chris hears one of the sentries say something to him in a low tone as he passes, and the others laugh. Stiles just clutches his ration packs tighter to his chest and keeps moving.

It’s getting late. Dusk is gathering, and there’s a chill on the air. Chris wonders where Stiles shelters, who he shares those ration packs with. Maybe a few of the other strays who hang around the place, waiting for someone to motion them closer. It’s none of Chris’s business really.

He turns on his heel and heads back inside.

 

***

 

There’s no way out of Beacon Hills. The military has checkpoints set up all along the road to the highway, and to go off road, to go through the woods… the wolves own the woods. There’s no way out except one, and Stiles can’t leave Lydia and the baby alone.

He can’t.

He _won’t_.

Stiles is doing what he has to do to survive. There’s no shame in that. It doesn’t matter what his dad would say, because his dad isn’t here, is he? His dad is _dead_. They’re all dead.

He holds the ration packs tightly as he hurries toward the high school.

His ass hurts, and he doesn’t know if that’s something he wants to do again. Maybe he’s bad at it, or Argent is, or maybe it was just because it was his first time? Maybe it’s something that gets better with practice, or maybe he’ll always be ambivalent about it at best. It doesn’t matter. He’s done it now, and Argent is going to expect him to keep doing it, so he’s going to have to get used to it.

Stiles is two blocks from the high school when he hears it: a low howl carried on the wind.

_Wolves._

Stiles freezes in panic, his heart thumping loudly.

And then he starts to run.

There’s no way of telling how far away the wolf is. They can move so fucking fast that it’s almost a moot point anyway. There’s no way of knowing if it can see him, smell him, or even has him in its sights at all.

The soles of his thin shoes slap against the cracked asphalt of the road. Fuck, it’s so _loud_. What if it didn’t know he was here before, but now it can hear him? What if he’s the one who leads it straight to the high school? The mountain ash barrier might keep it out of the basement, but then it’ll know where they are, and it’ll bring the others…

Fuck.

He can’t lead it to Lydia.

Stiles changes direction, barrelling toward a ruined house. He leaps up the steps and past the threshold—there’s no door anymore—and takes a sharp left into what was maybe a living room. There’s a rotting couch sitting on top of mold-spotted carpet. The roof has collapsed. Stiles crouches down behind the couch and looks up at the sky. The first stars are starting to appear.

Fuck.

Even if the wolves don’t sniff him out, he might be stuck here all night. Humans are blind at night. Wolves absolutely are not, and they like to hunt when the moon is out.

Stiles hugs the ration packs to his chest and tries to concentrate of his breathing. He takes long, slow breaths. Tries to hold the breath in his lungs as long as he can, until his heart rediscovers its regular rhythm.

Jesus. The high school is so close. At the same time it might as well be miles away.

He hears another howl, closer this time, and the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

_Please please please._

It’s a prayer without an addressee. Stiles gave up on god right about the time his mom died. Right about the time god gave up on him. It doesn’t stop him wishing there was something bigger though, something holding him in the warm palm of its hand, something to catch him as he falls. There isn’t though. Of course there fucking isn’t. Life has proved that over and over again.

Stiles squeezes his eyes shut, and remembers the way that Argent’s broad, callused palm had slid down his back, like he was counting every knot in Stiles’s spine. His hands had been warm, but Stiles doesn’t imagine for a moment they’re the sort of hands that will ever catch him. If Stiles is falling, it’s only because years ago Argent pushed.

“Run kiddo,” his dad had told him. “Run.”

Argent was there when the shooting started. Argent gave the order.

It doesn’t matter how fucking nice he was tonight. It doesn’t matter.

And, if he survives tonight, Stiles has to remember that.

 

***

 

It’s just past dawn when Stiles stumbles down the steps into the high school basement.

“Lydia?”

“Stiles!” She spins around, dropping the bundle she’s been holding. Ration packs spill everywhere. A second later she’s flinging herself at him, and they’re holding one another tightly. “I thought you weren’t coming back!”

“I’m sorry,” he rasps into her neck, into her hair. “I’m sorry. I was almost here, and I heard howling. I didn’t want to lead them here.”

“God, Stiles.” She draws back. Her face is tear-stained. “I’m so fucking _sick_ of this!”

“I-I’m sorry!”

“Not you.” She lays her palm against his cheek. “Just… just all of this. _Everything_. I wish it would just all stop. That we could close our eyes and go to sleep, and never have to wake up again.”

“Yeah,” he whispers, his eyes stinging. He puts his hand on her belly.

It’s a question.

“Yeah,” Lydia says. Her slight smile is sad.

Stiles reaches for her hands and holds them tightly. “We’re gonna be okay, Lydia. You, and me, and your baby. We’re gonna be okay.”

She leans into him. “You always did believe in fairytales.”

If that was ever true—maybe years and years ago in Mrs. Jansen’s kindergarten class, all the little kids lying down on their blankets for story time—Stiles can’t remember it now.

But he smiles and pretends he does, because this is what they do. This is how it works. When one of them stumbles, the other one helps them up. When one of them breaks, the other one puts them together. When one of them wants to quit, the other one promises they can still make it.

This is how it works.

Stiles doesn’t want to know what happens if they ever decide at the same time they’re done.

 


	4. Chapter 4

Of all his superiors, there’s one that Chris hates dealing with the most—his father. The war has been good to Gerard Argent, and he’s feasted on it like a tick. His face is pink and shiny when it appears on Chris’s laptop screen, and Chris feels a stab of something that might be envy. Gerard likes being the public face of the war. He likes to get on television and talk about how all of humanity is in this together. And meanwhile he wouldn’t even know how to open a ration pack. Not when every night he eats out at state functions in Washington. How long has it been since Gerard even drew a weapon?

The old man’s gone… well, he’s about as soft as a shrivelled up husk of dried flesh. He’s lost his edge though. Bound to have.

“Christopher,” he growls, and it’s impossible to tell if he’s pleased or if he’s pissed. That’s always been his way. “How are things in Beacon Hills?”

“Is this a social call, General?” Chris asks.

Gerard laughs at that. “Yes, goddammit. Drop the rank bullshit.”

Chris smiles slightly at that, mimicking his father’s amusement. “It’s Beacon Hills, or what’s left of it. We have the town and the wolves have the woods. Same old, same old.”

“You sound like you need a break,” Gerard says and, personal chat or not, Chris knows better than to agree.

“I’ve had a long day,” he says instead. “A good night’s sleep will see me right.”

“Good,” his father says. “Good.”

And Chris realizes with faint surprise, somewhere between Gerard’s rant about politicians and his rant about werewolves, that he truly, abidingly hates this man and everything he’s wrought.

 

***

 

Stiles sits in Argent’s room and watches as Argent works. He’s been coming here long enough now that most of the officers and soldiers under Argent’s command just ignore him when they knock on the major’s door to talk to him. Stiles hears things about supply convoys, about patrols, and wonders idly if he could be a spy. A part of him imagines that he is. Some sort of Mata Hari or something, worming his way into Argent’s bed, into his trust, except if Stiles knows one thing it’s this: he might hate the military, but he hates werewolves more. Argent could spill every classified secret he keeps inside his skull, and Stiles wouldn’t have anyone to tell at all.

He thinks that’s why nobody cares what he overhears. Not because they’re underestimating him, but because they’ve got the estimation of him exactly right. Stiles is a nobody, a nothing. A stray.

So he starts to ask questions.

“Why are you even still here though?” he asks one day when he’s scrubbing himself clean in the shower. It’s something Argent insists on every day. Stiles doesn’t blame him, not really. Not when he puts on the same filthy clothes as soon as they’re done fucking. “What’s left to protect?”

Argent folds his arms over his chest. “I’m not sure I understand the question, Stiles.”

“So if you left, and the wolves took Beacon Hill, so what? There’s nothing here worth having.”

Argent’s gaze lingers on him for a moment. “Isn’t there?”

“No. You flattened the town.” Stiles hates the way his voice hitches at that.

“I’m here because those are my orders,” Argent tells him with a shrug. “Come on. Get out of there.”

The water is still beading on Stiles’s skin when Argent hoists him up onto the bathroom sink and fucks into him. Stiles moans and lets his head fall back against the mirror. He keeps one hand on Argent’s shoulder for balance, wraps his legs around his hips, and jerks himself off with his free hand.

Argent grips his hair, and forces his head forward again. “You don’t do this with anyone else, do you, Stiles?”

“No,” Stiles moans. “No, just you.”

The words make something tighten uncomfortably in his gut. Because of course Argent is a possessive asshole. What Stiles doesn’t understand is his need to make sure Argent knows he’s telling the truth. He shouldn’t want that. Shouldn’t want to reassure him, to stroke his fucking ego. Argent doesn’t _own_ him. Stiles fucks him for ration packs and other supplies, and nothing else. He’d fuck anyone for the same. Argent shouldn’t get to think he’s anything special.

He lets his head drop back again, squeezing his eyes shut as Argent thrusts into him again.

It’s good.

It’s so good.

He hates that it is.

 

***

 

“Can you get me something?” Stiles asks when they’re done, and he’s stepping into his filthy jeans with torn knees and a broken zip.

Argent’s mouth curls in a knowing smile. “Something more than you’re already getting?”

Stiles’s face burns. He doesn’t know how much leverage he has here. Not when he’s already given up his ass. Maybe Argent is getting bored of him? Maybe he’s ready to toss Stiles out and find someone else to fuck.

He shifts his weight from foot to foot.

Argent’s expression hardens. “I don’t have all day. Just tell me what you want.”

“Diapers,” Stiles says. “I need diapers.”

He can’t read the expression that crosses Argent’s face. They might fuck every day, but Stiles doesn’t know the guy, not really. Not in any way that counts. “Diapers?”

Stiles nods and swallows. His throat is dry.

“What size?” Argent asks. “And for a boy or a girl?”

“I didn’t know they were different.”

Argent’s gaze settles on him closely.

“Um, the baby’s not here yet, so I don’t know.” Stiles chews his lip worriedly for a moment, and then swallows. His throat is dry. “It’s not mine. The baby. It’s not mine.”

The need to admit it is as strong as his earlier need to swear he wasn’t fucking anyone else, and Stiles hates himself for it. Hates that he might as well be naked again. Hates that it might as well be _I’m_ _yours_. Not when he’s nothing.

“That’s why you’re doing this.” It’s not a question.

Stiles shrugs on his filthy hoodie. “Yeah.”

Argent nods, his expression shuttered. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Stiles watches him warily for a moment. “Thank you.”

He pulls his hood forward before he leaves the hospital. His cheeks are wet and he doesn’t know why. He thinks it’s because it’s hard to hate the only person in the world who’s helping him, even when he should.

 

***

 

That night there’s a storm. The howling of the wind drowns out any howling of wolves. In the morning, all their containers have been blown off the roof, and Stiles and Lydia spend an hour tracking though the overgrown grounds of the high school trying to retrieve them all. Stiles does most of the bending down to pick them up, because in the past few days Lydia has just popped or something. Like before the baby was a bump, and now it’s like she’s smuggling a basketball under her shirt.

Lydia laughs and hits him with a plastic bucket when he tells her that.

It’s almost nice, working together in the sunlight.

“Are you going back today?” she asks him.

Stiles shrugs. “Until he gets sick of me.”

He doesn’t mention the diapers. He doesn’t want to get her hopes up if Argent can’t get them.

Lydia presses her mouth into a thin line

“I hate him,” Stiles tells her, “but it’s easy.”

He doesn’t tell her that it’s _good_ too. That he hates the guy, or tries to at least, but that he likes getting fucked now. That sometimes it feels so fucking incredible that it makes him forget about his shitty life for just a few minutes, and even without factoring the ration packs in, that it feels like a pretty sweet deal.

They’re heading back through the ruined corridors of the high school when Stiles sees that the storm has brought more of the roof down outside the administration offices. One of the cabinets has been knocked down. The wood is wet now, but could be useful later. And if nature’s been good enough to bust the cabinet apart for them, why not use it?

The floor is covered in bits of broken glass, and Stiles picks out a few of the larger pieces. They’ll be useful too, for starting fires or as cutting tools.

Lydia huffs as she squats down and picks up a photograph that’s fallen out of the frame.

Stiles glances at it without really looking. A basketball team, or whatever. Smiling faces of teenagers from long ago who are now dead men. The glass is smashed and the frame is falling apart.

“Stiles,” Lydia says, her voice pitched oddly. “Look at this.”

He takes the photograph, and feels a flash of recognition as he looks at the boy on the edge of the front row. He doesn’t trust it though, and scans quickly through the rain-spotted names at the bottom of the photograph.

_Christopher Argent._

He meets Lydia’s gaze. “He’s _from_ here?”

Lydia looks just as bemused as Sstiles feels.

“Why…” Stiles swallows. “If he’s from here, why would…”

“I don’t know,” Lydia whispers.

Stiles closes his eyes for a moment and tries not to remember the feel of Argent’s hands on his skin. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.”

“Stiles,” Lydia says softly.

Stiles opens his eyes and sucks in a deep breath. “He killed my dad, Lydia. Why the fuck should this make any difference?”

He hands the photograph back to her, and picks up as much of the wood as he can.

It doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters.

 

***

 

The rain drowns out the sound of the wolves. Chris doesn’t sleep. He finds himself thinking of Stiles, of the look on his face when he’d asked for diapers. Like he was afraid he was asking for too much or, most likely, like he was afraid of revealing too much.

Perhaps he did.

Chris thinks he got a glimpse of the true Stiles today. The boy who’s whoring himself out for a baby who isn’t even born yet. A baby who’ll be born into hell. Eighteen years old, and Stiles is already a better man than Chris.

This was supposed to be a bloodless transaction, wasn’t it?

Chris doesn’t sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

“No,” Stiles says when Chris tries to kiss him. He turns his face away. “Not that. Not you.”

The refusal doesn’t entirely surprise Chris.

The disappointment he feels does.

 

***

 

“Derek!” Peter Hale yells out across the clearing, and his nephew turns and glowers. Such an ugly expression on such a pretty face. Peter likes to remind him of that often, just to watch his glower deepen. Derek has no fucking sense of humor. “Put him down!”

Derek growls, a low, deep rumble, and slams the beta to the ground. The others circle, watchful.

Peter strides over to them, and nudges the beta with the toe of his boot. “What do I keep telling you, Jackson? If you try to run away, Derek gets very angry.”

Jackson bares his fangs at Peter, and no, that will not stand. Peter flashes his eyes alpha red and growls, and Jackson whines and tilts his head to expose his throat. Looking particularly mutinous and mulish while he does it, of course, but he submits all the same. He might hate himself for it, but the instincts of the wolf are stronger than those of the human. If they weren’t, Peter would have been killed in his sleep a hundred times already. This week alone.

Jackson does _not_ like him.

“Get up,” Peter tells him, waving a hand vaguely. “Go. Run. Frolic.”

Jackson climbs to his feet, gaze averted and cheeks pink with shame. Scott and Erica draw him away.

“He’ll challenge you one day,” Derek says conversationally.

“And I’ll beat him,” Peter says.

Derek snorts, and folds his arms over his chest. He watches the other betas for a while, and rolls his eyes when Boyd and Isaac get into a tussle. Erica joins in happily, while Scott appears to be trying to talk Jackson down.

Scott’s a peacemaker. Still, there’s something about him that makes Peter wary. Jackson might be an obvious threat to his power, but Scott is different. He’s got the air of righteous goodness about him, and fuck knows there’s no room for that in a war.

Peter turns and heads back into the cover of the trees, leaving Derek to supervise the betas. Truth be told, he’s better at it than Peter. Peter was never supposed to be the alpha. He’s not sorry he killed Kali though. Not after the bitch tore Laura’s throat out.

Peter takes a deep breath and fills his lungs with the scent of pine and petrichor. He used to escape deep into the Preserve all the time when he was younger, fuming at some imagined slight, desperate to get out of the fucking house where he couldn’t get a moment’s privacy. He’d slink into the Preserve, shed his human skin, and run for hours.

And now?

Now he’d kill just to have a roof over his head for a single night.

No exaggeration at all.

They stay on the move. They don’t build. Any structure than can be seen from a satellite is just asking for an airstrike. There are some caves down by the river that they use sometimes, but they’re wolves. Nature made them to live in the woods. Which doesn’t mean Peter has to revel in it. Some nights, when he ventures into town—and doesn’t Derek hate that?—Peter likes to check out the empty houses. Most of them are in a state of utter ruin, but Peter likes to take in their dimensions and imagine the way they would have looked before. Perfectly ordinary houses in a perfectly ordinary town, that belong to a world Peter is no longer a part of.

Peter’s acute hearing picks up the faint blast of static on the radio up near camp—another reason they keep moving; the radio is necessary, but they can’t risk the signals being triangulated. He quickens his pace, reaching the radio just in time to see Cora answer it.

“He’s here now,” she says, handing the microphone to Peter.

Peter sighs, and squeezes the button. “Deucalion,” he says. “What’s the news from Portland?”

 

***

 

Everything started with Deucalion.

Well, perhaps with Talia. Peter’s sister and alpha had always favored diplomacy over bloodshed. A part of Peter is glad she died before she saw where that decision had led. She’d loved their quiet little town.

Talia was the one who had convinced Deucalion to agree to meet with Gerard Argent in the hopes of brokering a peace with the hunters.

Bloodshed.

A massacre.

It was a miracle any of them had survived.

It should have ended there, or at least the rest should have been played out in secret like it had been for centuries. But Deucalion, mad with grief and rage, had declared war on all hunters. The Argents had struck back by burning down the Hale house, with most of the Hales inside.

“Do you _see_ , Peter?” Deucalion had growled. “Do you see how dangerous they are?”

And Peter had wanted revenge too, had burned for it, but not like this.

Never like this.

Not just because Talia wouldn’t have wanted it, but because even a blind man could see where it would lead. Well, not every blind man, perhaps. But perhaps Deucalion had seen after all, and just didn’t care.

“We won’t,” Laura had said. “Revealing our existence to humanity will be disastrous. We won’t be a part of it.”

Kali had ripped her throat out.

Peter had ripped Kali’s out in return.

He was never supposed to be the alpha.

There was never supposed to be a war. But Deucalion had brought one, and Gerard Argent had answered in kind, and Beacon Hills had burned.

 

***

“Why don’t we leave, though?” Erica asked him once. “Why don’t we go somewhere else?”

“Because this is our territory,” Peter told her.

She’d nodded, frowning, and he’d seen she didn’t understand. How could she? She didn’t then, and she doesn’t now. She doesn’t feel the same pull of the land that Peter does. It doesn’t hold the memory of generations of Hales. Her family isn’t buried here. And she doesn’t know what the whispering trees are really hiding.

Peter never wanted a war, but he’s found himself in one, and he’s not going to lose.

He’s rebuilding his pack because he’s no fool. He’s doing it slowly because Deucalion is a paranoid son of a bitch who won’t hesitate to kill his own allies if he thinks they’re plotting against him.

Sooner or later the war in the outside world will exhaust itself. Sooner or later someone—either the military or another wolf pack—will make a move on the Preserve, and Peter will drown it in blood before he allows anyone to take his territory.

Beacon Hills was where Peter’s war started.

It will be where his war ends as well, one way or another.

 

***

 

It was another life back then. It was another world.

Peter misses it the way he misses the innocence of childhood. It was beautiful, it was full of light, and he can never go back. His memories bring equal measures of comfort and torment.

***

 

These days when Peter shifts he lets the wolf have full rein. The wolf isn’t beset with fear and doubts. The wolf isn’t a prisoner of memory and regret. The wolf just wants to run and hunt and howl. It’s easier too for the betas to fall in line when everyone is shifted. All their petty moral complexities peel away like falling leaves when their wolves take charge.

Peter is the alpha. He is strong and they obey him. Even sullen, intractable Jackson unbends in wolf form, and becomes eager to please.

This is pack.

 

***

 

It was Kate Argent who burned the Hale house down. She seduced Derek in order to get close. Peter doesn’t know what has happened to her in the course of the war, but he hopes she’s dead, and he hopes she suffered. Peter hopes there’s a hell—beyond this one, naturally—and that she’s in it.

He feels guilty because he never saw it coming.

Guiltier, because maybe he should have.

Maybe Kate wasn’t the first one Gerard sent after the Hales like that.

The pattern more or less fits.

 

***

 

Of course Jackson runs again. Peter finds him halfway to town, Derek standing over him and growling. Peter steps forward and pulls Jackson to his feet. Sinks his claws into his shoulder.

“You make me very angry, Jackson.”

Jackson tries to pull away, and winces as Peter’s claws tears through skin and muscle.

Peter lets his eyes bleed red. “You’re a wolf now, Jackson. You’re not one of them anymore. You need to think very fucking carefully about where your loyalties lie.”

Jackson tries to glare at him, but he can’t hold his gaze for more than seconds.

“You think you can trust the humans?” Peter leans in closer. Blood wells under his claws, hot and sweet. “Because if you think that, Jackson… if you think that, then one day you’ll wake up to the screams of your pack as your house burns down around you.”

“You should just kill him and be done with it,” Derek says.

Jackson flinches again, eyes wide.

“No,” Peter says thoughtfully. He withdraws his claws, and slings an arm around Jackson’s hunched shoulders. Peter flashes a brilliant smile, bright and sunny. “I like him. He keeps you on your toes.”

Jackson is unsettled, wary of how quickly Peter’s mood changes. The silly boy hasn’t realized yet that it’s nothing more than another form of intimidation. Another way to keep him in line, keep him off balance.

Derek snorts—more than familiar with the tactic and almost totally immune to it by now—but his gaze says more: _He’ll try to kill you._

Peter knows.

 

***

 

There’s a part of Chris that wonders what it would feel like to wake up to Stiles in the morning. He never asks Stiles to stay at night. He knows Stiles would only refuse. Chris wonders if that should rankle. Isn’t he the one in the position of power here? Isn’t he the one who gets to call the shots? But there has always been something ephemeral about Stiles. Chris knows that if he pushes too much there will come a point when Stiles will vanish into the mist.

He’s lonely, he thinks, and he’s using the bare sketch of this boy, filling in the lines with more than exists to try and flesh him out, when in reality there is nothing between them. It’s dangerous to try and impose a fantasy like affection on someone like Stiles, like trying to build on sand.

It is what it is.

Chris has no right to try and make it anything more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My weekend is over and I'm back at work tomorrow, so probably posting a chapter a day at whatever time this is in your part of the world.


	6. Chapter 6

Stiles walks down the corridors of the old hospital. It’s full of men and women in khaki and camouflage, not the shades of pastel colors Stiles remembers from when the doctors and nurses filled the place. He wonders what happened to all of them.

There were round-ups. He thinks that’s what Melissa called them. She told Scott and Stiles not to worry, that she was in an essential industry, that she’d be okay. And then one night she didn’t come home from work.

The thin soles of Stiles’s shoes squeak against the linoleum floor.

What happened to all the people?

Stiles still doesn’t know. And he’s afraid to ask.

 

***

 

“You really think I’m a monster, huh?” Chris asks when he steps toward Stiles and Stiles steps back.

A hundred different micro expressions filter over Stiles’s face before he settles back into his blank mask. “What does it matter what I think?”

Chris huffs out a silent laugh.

Stiles toes his shoes off, pulls his hoodie over his head, and shucks his jeans off. He steps into the shower, and vanishes for a moment under a cloud of steam. He slicks his hair back. His skin gleams underneath the water. He looks sleek. Not as skinny as he was the first time. His eyes are dark when his gaze lands on Chris again.

“I think that once upon a time you went to Beacon Hills High, and then you bombed the fuck out of this town.”

Chris raises his eyebrows. “Now how could you know about that, Stiles?”

The sudden flash of fear in Stiles’s eyes tells him all he needs to know. So Stiles has been sheltering in the high school, has he? Flicking through yearbooks or something. Clever boy, but it means less than he thinks.

“I didn’t call in the airstrikes,” Chris says. “I don’t have that authority, whatever you think. That took a congressional order. Way above my pay grade, kiddo.”

Stiles swallows. “Don’t call me that.”

Chris turns and walks into his room. He checks his messages, and finds nothing there that needs his immediate attention. He’s half-listening to the sound of the shower. When it cuts out, his dick twitches in anticipation.

Chris sits in the chair by the window, idly rubbing himself through his uniform pants. It only takes Stiles a few minutes to appear. He’s not quite dry. Droplets of water escape his hair and slide down his skin.

Chris unzips his pants and motions him over.

“No,” he says when Stiles drops the towel on the floor and goes to kneel. Chris reaches out and curls his fingers around his wrist instead. He pulls him onto his lap, and relishes the flicker of uncertainty in Stiles’s eyes before he finds a way to settle himself, his knees jammed between Chris’s thighs and the arms of the chair, straddling him.

Stiles’s cheeks are pink when he lifts his gaze to Chris’s.

“Come on,” Chris says.

Stiles nods and swallows, a tiny frown pinching the skin at the top of his nose.

Chris leans back.

Stiles tugs Chris’s dick out of his underwear, and lifts himself up onto his knees to position himself. The head of Chris’s dick presses against his hole, finding resistance, and Stiles shudders as he sinks down, his breath hitching.

He bites his lower lip as he starts to rock his hips, and Chris is struck by how beautiful he is. Was he always this beautiful? Stiles won’t let Chris kiss him, so Chris lifts a hand to his face instead, and rubs a thumb against his full bottom lip. Stiles clenches around him, and they both moan at the sensation.

Stiles sets his shaking hands on Chris’s shoulders, and digs his fingers in. Rides him.

He’s so tight. So good as he bounces on Chris’s lap. His dick is erect, and leaking precum. Chris folds his fingers around it, and Stiles jerks as violently as a fish caught on a hook. His face is red, his eyes bright with tears.

“Please,” he mutters. “Please. Fuck. _Please_.”

He throws his head back when he comes, as wild and breathtaking as a breaking storm.

 

***

 

“You need some new clothes,” Chris says later, watching Stiles pull on his filthy ones.

“Yeah,” Stiles says. One side of his mouth pulls up in a grim smile. “I’ll just swing by Walmart on the way home, huh?”

“I can get you clothes,” Chris says quietly.

Stiles hesitates for a moment, then disappears inside the folds of his hoodie. His hair is standing up at odd angles when his head reappears. “Yeah, no. I’d rather not dress like you guys and have a werewolf rip my throat out, thanks.”

That piques Chris’s interest. “They don’t target you?”

Stiles pauses for a moment. “No, they don’t _target_ us. But if we get in their way, we fucking know about it. You’re not the only one who’s seen a werewolf rip someone apart. Only difference is, I don’t have a gun full of wolfsbane bullets to protect myself with.”

Chris raises his eyebrows. “I hope you’re not thinking of asking me for one of those.”

“I hope you’re not calling me a fucking idiot,” Stiles shoots back.

Chris feels a frisson of something that’s not quite anger. It’s the part of him that rises to a challenge, and he doesn’t doubt for a moment that Stiles is challenging him. It’s been years since anyone dared do that. He finds himself smiling. “Not at all.”

Stiles regards him narrowly, mouth a thin line. He drags his fingers through his hair.

“I can get you clothes,” Chris repeats.

“Okay.” Stiles looks around the room, avoiding Chris’s gaze. He sees the framed picture beside Chris’s bed; the one he usually puts in his drawer before Stiles turns up. “Who’s that?”

The simple question makes Chris uneasy, as though some unstated boundary is being crossed. “My daughter. Allison.”

Stiles steps closer. His hands twitch by his sides as though he’s forcing himself not to reach out and touch the frame. “She’s pretty.”

“She gets that from her mother, not me.”

Stiles’s answering smile is hesitant, a little unsure of itself. He ducks his head.

“She lives in Washington,” Chris says, unsure why he’s even telling Stiles this. “I haven’t seen her in years, but we talk, and we write.”

Stiles’s jaw tightens and he nods. His eyes are shining, and he steps away from the photograph and drops his gaze to the floor. He chews his lip for a moment, and then looks up again. “All the doctors and nurses. What happened to them?”

“Conscripted, probably,” Chris says. “Or sent to the camps.”

“We have camps now?” Stiles asks. This time his smile is bitter. “Of course we do.”

“For dissidents.”

“Right.” Stiles crouches down to put his shoes on. “Of course.”

“This is war, Stiles.” Chris regards him steadily. “Don’t pretend to be naïve.”

“I’m a long way from naïve, Major,” Stiles tells him, rising to his feet again. “Thanks to you.”

“Nobody forced you into this,” Chris tells him, keeping his voice even.

“That’s not—” Stiles shakes his head.

“Not what?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Stiles won’t look at him. “I need to go. Can I have my ration packs now?” His hands are shaking. He shoves them in the pockets of his hoodie. “Please?”

Chris picks them up from on top of his footlocker, and hands them over.

He doesn’t bother walk Stiles to the exit.

The kid knows his way by now.

 

***

 

Stiles has a hundred walls built around him, Chris thinks, built to withstand a hundred sieges. This is war, Chris told him, but the shape of it casts a very different shadow on each of their lives. He thinks of Allison, nineteen now, and not untouched by the war. There’s probably nobody who is untouched by the war. But Allison doesn’t know how filthy it is, how tiring it is, how gray the entire world becomes in the ruins of it.

Stiles is eighteen. He would have been ten when the war started. It’s almost half his life. Half his life living like a scavenger, like a stray, while Chris complains of army food and bureaucracy and boredom.

Stiles has a hundred walls around him, and Chris will never be the man who gets past them. He has no right to even try.

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t even hear the attacker coming. He’s a few blocks from the school, following his familiar route between the burned out cars and the piles of rubble, when he’s tackled from behind and sent sprawling. The ration packs scatter in front of him, and Stiles reaches out for them instinctively before his brain actually kicks into gear and reminds him that they’re not the fucking thing to worry about right now.

It’s not the first time someone’s tried to fight him for food, and Stiles tries to buck the guy off his back. And then fingers are clenching around his throat, fingers tipped with razor-sharp claws, and Stiles freezes.

 _Wolf_.

He goes limp immediately. Why not? He’s already dead.

There’s a growl in his ear that takes a long moment to coalesce into a word. Maybe it’s the fangs, or maybe it’s Stiles’s panic. “Stiles!”

The wolf flips him so he’s lying on his back.

The monstrous face is more terrifying because it’s almost familiar. “Jackson?”

Jackson’s eyes flash gold under his ridged brow. When he opens his mouth, his fangs gleam. “Where’s Lydia?”

No. No, Stiles can’t tell him that. He’ll tear her apart. Just a few weeks ago Stiles watched them sitting together in the house on Maple Street, Jackson’s hand resting protectively over her belly, and now he’s a monster, and he’s come to kill her.

He shakes his head, his eyes filling with tears.

Jackson growls, and grips him by the throat again. “Where’s Lydia?”

Stiles closes his eyes and thinks of his mom and dad. Wonders if they’re waiting for him somewhere, or if that’s just all bullshit. It’s probably bullshit, but Stiles is going to try and believe it for as long as he can. He’s going to imagine them somewhere safe and clean and full of light, where nothing that happened here matters anymore.

He’s expecting Jackson to tear his throat out.

Instead, there’s a sudden roar from close by, and suddenly Jackson is knocked off him. Stiles’s eyes flash open. Jackson is on his hands and knees on the road, growling still, and baring his throat to the werewolf standing over him.

Which can only mean one thing.

It’s the alpha.

The alpha turns to look at Stiles. His eyes are glowing red. He lifts his nose as though he’s chasing some scent on the air, and his mouth curls into a predatory smile.

“Well then,” he says, and Stiles’s heart clenches, “aren’t you a pretty little thing?”


	7. Chapter 7

The boy smells like fear. He has the fast-thumping heartbeat of a frantic rabbit. He smells like filth, unwashed clothes that have been lived in, sweated in, bled in—layers of dirt and stench so tightly packed that even Peter’s nose can’t pick them apart. Underneath that, though, he smells like soap. Not the sweet floral notes of soaps that Peter remembers from expensive stores, the sort that tickled his nose like spring, but something hard and cheap and chemical.

And laid over his skin like a thin sheen of sweat is the sharp, salty scent of another man.

Peter’s fangs drop when he recognizes it.

Chris Argent.

 

***

 

“Oh god,” Stiles says as the alpha lifts him effortlessly to his feet. “Please don’t. Please.”

He’s breathing hard, but however much air he pulls into his lungs, it’s not enough. The alpha is holding him up by the neck of his hoodie, and Stiles never imagined when it came to being killed by a werewolf that it’d be strangulation, but since when has Stiles done thing the expected way? Dad always said he was full of surprises—like coming down with the chickenpox in the middle of a measles scare, or breaking up a dog fight and then getting bitten by a cat on the way home—but he always said it with a smile.

“Please,” Stiles rasps, his fingers scrabbling at the alpha’s.

He’s not ready to die. He _can’t_ die. Lydia’s counting on him, and so is the baby, and maybe Stiles isn’t the guy she really wants beside her in all this, but he’s the only one who’s made it this far, right? That’s the sort of result Stiles figures nobody would see coming.

Stiles Stilinski. Always unpredictable.

“Please,” he rasps again.

The alpha leans in, and Stiles flinches as he feels warm breath against his throat. When the alpha leans back again, his face isn’t wolfed out anymore. His eyes aren’t red anymore. They’re blue. The alpha loosens his grip on the neck of Stiles’s hoodie, but doesn’t release him. His intense gaze slides over Stiles like he’s trying to peel back his skin and see inside. He lifts his free hand and rubs his thumb along Stiles’s jaw, eyes narrowing.

Stiles is dizzy with fear. “Pl-please.”

The alpha inspects his thumb as though he expects to find it filthy after rubbing it against Stiles’s skin. Stiles thinks wildly of movies where people check for dust on furniture by using white gloves. Then the alpha holds his thumb to his mouth and licks it. He gives a low hum of something that sounds almost like approval.

Stiles’s stomach knots.

“Who are you, little rabbit?” the alpha asks, his mouth turning up in a smile.

“St-Stiles,” Stiles manages, blinking through his sudden tears.

“No, sweetheart,” the alpha says. His licks his bottom lip like he’s still chasing the taste of him. “Who are you to _Argent_?”

Stiles’s mind goes blank.

He’s nothing. He’s a stray. Sometimes Argent looks at him when they fuck, holds his gaze, and Stiles wants to forget who they are, forget everything except how good it feels, but he’s nothing. He’s nothing to Argent. He wishes that Argent was nothing to him as well, but every time he tries, every time he thinks they could just be two people, two strangers thrown together by chance, every time Stiles tries to believe that, he feels his dad’s palms on the side of his face, sees his dad’s eyes and the weight of everything in them, and hears his dad’s voice all over again:

 _“I love you, son. Run home now._ Run _.”_

The alpha growls again, a low rumble. “I can smell him on you.”

Stiles blinks, and tears slide down his cheeks. “I’m nothing. I’m his whore.”

From somewhere close by Jackson whines, but Stiles doesn’t dare turn his head to look.

The alpha frowns slightly, and tilts his head as though he’s looking for a new angle to see Stiles with. As though there’s something more to see. As though everything Stiles is isn’t just laid out bare in front of him with that single word. _Whore_.

The alpha runs the tip of a claw down Stiles’s cheek, teasing him with the promise of pain that doesn’t come. “How very interesting. And how useful, hmm? Tell me, Stiles, do you hate him?”

“Yes.” Stiles knows it’s pointless to lie to a wolf. Pointless to lie at all, probably, when he’s this close to death.

“How often do you go to him?”

“Ev-every day.”

The alpha’s smile widens. “How wonderfully insatiable you must be.”

Stiles face burns, even though no insult should be able to touch him now.

“Well then,” the alpha says. “Why should Christopher be the only one to enjoy the spoils of war?”

Stiles blink again, and more tears trail down his face.

The alpha rubs his thumb along Stiles’s cheekbone, collecting the moisture. “What do you say, little rabbit? Do we have a deal?”

“Yes,” Stiles whispers through his tears.

 

***

 

The alpha doesn’t do anything, not really, but somehow it makes Stiles feel more exposed than he ever has with Argent. The alpha takes him to a ruined house, and there, watched over by the moldering photographs of a smiling family, Stiles strips off his clothes and stands there, his hands covering his dick, while the alpha touches him. Soft, sweeping passes of his palm. His nose pressing into Stiles’s throat. His mouth on Stiles’s shoulder.

Stiles shivers and cries silently, and the alpha laughs at him.

Stiles can hear Jackson pacing and growling just outside the doorway, and that makes it worse, he thinks. Jackson’s not his friend anymore—Jackson’s not even human anymore—but it’s humiliating to know he can hear everything that’s happening. Stupid too, that it’s humiliating. That thing isn’t the Jackson that Stiles knew.

When the alpha leaves, Stiles sinks down onto the floor. It takes him a long time to stave off his panic attack. It takes him even longer to tug his clothes back on with shaking hands. He’s scared to leave the ruined house, but he’s scared to stay as well. When he finally works up the courage to go, he discovers the ration packs he dropped in the street have been stacked neatly by the door.

 

***

 

The second he stumbles down the stairs and crosses the threshold into the school basement, Stiles breaks. Lydia holds him close while he tells her, in between heaving sobs, everything that happened.

“Jackson?” she asks, eyes wide as she seems to suddenly shrink into herself.

“Wolf,” Stiles says. “He’s a wolf.”

Lydia nods, eyes glittering with tears. “Do we need to move?”

“I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t _know_.”

“Shh,” Lydia says. “It’s okay, Stiles. We’ll be okay.”

The words have never felt more empty.

 

***

 

“What the hell did you do?” Derek asks Peter in a low voice when he drags Jackson back to the Preserve.

“Nothing,” Peter says.

Jackson and Scott are engaged in a low, urgent conversation. Scott keeps turning to look at Peter, his expression an intriguing mix of horror and resignation.

“If Jackson didn’t insist on running back to town every chance he gets, I wouldn’t have touched a hair on his little friend’s head.”

Derek sighs. “Tell me what you did.”

“I made a deal,” Peter says. “With a whore.”

He doesn’t tell Derek why. He won’t reveal his belly by talking about how compelled he was to touch the boy, not to hurt him but to trace every place that Chris has touched, to drink in Chris’s scent, and to leave his own in its place. To touch the boy that Chris had touched, as though he’s some sort of sacred object. As though Peter, by touching him, can be touching Chris too.

“We can’t be seen together,” Chris said years ago, and Peter had laughed at how serious he sounded.

“We’re in the same homeroom, dick.”

“You know what I mean.”

Yes, Peter had known then and he knows now. They’ve always been enemies, Peter and Chris, born on different sides of an ancient grudge and set against one another before they even met. It had all the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy, or at least a particularly overwrought telenovela, Peter had thought at the time. These days he leans more toward a farce.

“It’s just a little stress relief,” Peter says airily. “Nothing to get worried about.”

His voice carries.

He intended it to.

Scott turns again, eyes flashing in anger.

Interesting.

Peter lowers his voice again. “I need you to keep an eye on him.”

“On Jackson?”

Jackson has always been easy to read. Peter should have ignored him instead of turning him, but hindsight is a bitch like that. The beta’s devotion to his girlfriend and his unborn child would be almost touching, if it weren’t such a liability. She’s a human. It can only end in death. Jackson’s, if he’s not careful. For all that humans are physically weaker than wolves, they’re not powerless. Peter knows too well not to underestimate them. Some days he can still taste the ashes in his mouth.

“On Scott too,” he says at last.

Derek nods in agreement.

 

***

 

That night Peter shifts into his wolf form to hunt. He stays away from town, and keeps to the woods. The woods are alive at night, and Peter chases down more prey than he can eat himself, delivering what’s left to his grateful betas. Every time he sinks his fangs into the hot sweet flesh of a quivering animal he thinks of Stiles and his frantic rabbit heart, his soft underbelly, and the sweet coppery scent of hot blood under his pale skin.

 

***

 

In the middle of the night when Lydia is asleep, Stiles lights a candle, his shaking fingers fumbling with the matches. He shuffles on his knees over to the stack of textbooks that he and Lydia keep to read, and finds the photograph of the basketball team. Lydia has been using it as a bookmark. Stiles holds it close to the flame of the candle as he studies it carefully. This time his gaze isn’t caught by Chris Argent. This time he studies each face on the team.

He finds the one he’s looking for in the back row.

The alpha.

Peter Hale.


	8. Chapter 8

There’s a new soldier at the checkpoint when Stiles arrives at HQ the next day.

“What do you want?” he asks Stiles, and he sounds more curious than abrasive.

Stiles looks at the ground. “I’m here to see Major Argent.”

“What for?”

The soldiers manning the checkpoint with him aren’t new. They laugh and tell the new guy exactly what Stiles is there for.

Stiles shoves up his sleeve and shows the new guy the still-healing cuts on his arm from every time he’s been tested before being allowed inside.

“Okay,” the guy says.

Stiles looks up at him. “What?”

“You haven’t healed from last time,” the guy says. “I don’t need to cut you again, do I?”

“It’s standard operating procedure, newbie,” one of the others calls.

“It’s unnecessary.” The new guy nods at Stiles. “Go on. You’re good.”

Stiles goes inside before the guy changes his mind.

 

***

 

Stiles is jittery today, distracted. Chris is still working on his correspondence when Stiles gets out of the shower.

“Sit,” he says, pointing at the chair by the window. “Don’t fidget.”

Stiles folds himself into the chair like a long-legged insect, all sharp edges and angles.

Chris goes through the latest dispatches. His orders from command are the same as they have always been, and exactly those he gave Stiles: _Sit. Don’t fidget_. The real story isn’t in the orders of course. The real story can be read in the extra fifty troops Chris got sent without asking for, in the new body armor being issued to his guys, and in weapons and medical supplies being sent his way. Something is coming.

Chris works for an hour or so, listening to the footfalls that occasionally pass by his rooms. When he finally closes his laptop and looks over at Stiles, Stiles is curled up in the chair, asleep. His head is resting on the arm of the chair, and his arms are hugging his knees. His pale skin seems to almost glow in the sunlight from the window.

Chris can’t stop his slight smile, or the warmth that spreads through him to see the Stiles sleeping there. He doesn’t fool himself that it has anything to do with Stiles feeling safe enough around him to let his guard down. The shadows under Stiles’s eyes are black. It’s exhaustion pure and simple that’s brought him down.

Chris drums his fingers silently over his closed laptop, and wonders for a moment if he should let Stiles sleep. Chris’s feeling for Stiles are uncomplicated by guilt when Stiles is asleep, when his gaze isn’t fixed on Chris and full of the thing he’s seen.

Chris stands and crosses the floor. He reaches out and drags the pads of his fingers against Stiles’s cheek. “Hey, kid.”

“Dad?” Stiles mumbles, eyes blinking slowly open as he snuffles awake.

Chris turns away so he can pretend he didn’t hear that, for both their sakes. The last thing Chris wants is a reminder that Stiles is younger than Allison, and that he’s someone’s child. Far easier to pretend that Stiles just appeared that day in the parking lot, hungry-eyed and ready to do what he needed. Chris doesn’t need to imagine him growing up, with band-aids on his knees, a father teaching him to ride a bike, a mother kissing him goodnight as she tucked him in. Far easier not to think about that at all.

“Sorry,” Stiles murmurs, and Chris doesn’t know if the apology is for what he said, or for the fact he fell asleep.

He turns back.

Stiles is standing now. He lifts his gaze to meet Chris’s eyes, and drops the towel. “How do you want me today?”

Chris nods toward the bed.

 

***

 

Stiles’s fingers dig into the sheets, leaving them creased and rumpled. Chris studies the little hills and valleys he’s made while Stiles gets dressed again.

“Before you go,” he says.

Stiles looks at him warily.

Chris drags the bag out from under his table, and unzips it. “Diapers,” he says. “And some clothes for you and your friend.”

Stiles looks at the gaping bag, at the items inside, and then looks at Chris. His eyes are wide.

He crouches down by the bag, and starts pulling things out onto the floor. _Not here,_ Chris wants to tell him, but he’s never seen this expression on Stiles’s face before. He looks almost overcome. He clenches his jaw, blinks rapidly, and unpacks the bag with shaking hands, holding each item up like it’s a treasure.

A few packs of diapers, some jeans, some shirts and hoodies. And, right at the bottom of the bag, a selection of pastel onesies for the baby, the fabric soft and warm.

“I didn’t…” Stiles shakes his head. “I didn’t know the army could get all this!”

Chris nods.

Let him think it comes from the same depot as the ration packs. He doesn’t need to know that Chris ordered it online. He doesn’t need to know that the entire country isn’t like Beacon Hills. That there are places still where life is almost the way it was before. Where there are stores, and schools, and ordinary people living ordinary lives. Places where the war might be on the front pages of the newspaper, but the tree-lined streets are untouched. Stiles’s world is horrific, and so very, very small.

“If you want anything else, you only have to ask,” Chris says.

Stiles closes his eyes. When he opens them again, they’re full of tears. “Don’t. Don’t say that. Not to me.” He shoves everything back into the bag, and rises to his feet. “Don’t make me… don’t make me _grateful_.”

Chris doesn’t know what reaction he expected from Stiles for the clothes and the diapers, but it’s not the flash of anger that suddenly lights up the boy’s face.

“Whatever you give me, whatever you think I want, it’s never going to be enough. Do you understand that?” He sucks in a shaking breath. “Never.”

“That’s not what this is,” Chris tells him. “That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

He wonders though, if that’s the truth.

He crosses to the window and looks out onto the ruins of the town.

When he turns back again, Stiles is gone.

 

***

 

“Hello, little rabbit,” Peter Hale says, falling into step beside Stiles as he lugs the bag back toward the high school. “Oh. Was Christopher feeling particularly generous today?”

Stiles knows he should be terrified of the alpha. Knows he should flinch away. He also knows it wouldn’t make any difference at all.

They stop at the same house they did the day before, and Stiles hefts the bag inside with him, and then tugs his clothes off.

He feels a frisson of fear as the alpha touches him, sniffs him, runs his hands over all the places that Argent has already been today. He keeps his gaze fixed on the floor, and his mouth clamped shut, but, unlike yesterday, the fear he feels isn’t bone deep. It’s nothing more than a surface sensation, like goose bumps. Stiles doesn’t understand it, but he doesn’t think the alpha wants to kill him at all. Stiles isn’t even sure the wolf really registers that he’s a person. He’s fixated, but not on Stiles exactly. It’s almost like he’s not really here at all, like the alpha is just reading a letter than somebody else happened to write on Stiles’s skin.

When the alpha finally steps away from him, Stiles reaches down for his clothes and tugs them on.

“Hey,” he says, heart thumping.

Peter Hale, halfway out the door already, stops and turns.

“What are you going to give me?” Stiles asks him, lifting his chin.

“Excuse me?” The alpha folds his arms over his chest.

“Argent gives me food and clothes. What are you going to give me?”

“I thought letting you live was payment enough, little rabbit.”

“If you kill me, you won’t get to do that again,” Stiles tells him.

Peter Hale raises his eyebrows and smirks. “Clever.”

And then he’s gone.

It’s not an answer, at least not to the question that Stiles asked, but it’s something. It’s exactly what he needed to know. Stiles isn’t dead and, more than that, maybe he’s actually got some leverage here after all.

 

***

 

That night Stiles and Lydia go through a bunch of old yearbooks, searching for traces of Peter Hale and Christopher Argent. They were on the same basketball team, and in the same homeroom, but Stiles knows there’s more than that, more than the yearbooks are telling them.

“Peter could have killed me, but he didn’t.”

Lydia purses her lips. “Maybe he’s just playing with you.”

“Maybe.” Stiles frowns. “But he’s not…” He shakes his head. “If he wanted to use me to get at Argent, wouldn’t he hurt me? I mean, if he thought I meant something to Argent or whatever. But it’s like I’m…”

“Like you’re the only way he gets to scent Argent,” Lydia says.

“Yeah.” Stiles chews his bottom lip.

“That’s a hell of a thing to risk your life on, Stiles.”

“What do we know about werewolves?” Stiles asks her. “What do we _really_ know?”

“You’ve seen what they can do.”

“Yeah.” And he still has nightmares about it as well. “But he didn’t hurt me, Lydia. He could have, but he didn’t.”

“No,” Lydia says firmly, snapping a yearbook shut. “No, we’re not going to re-evaluate our entire notion of werewolves just because of that. You’ve seen them kill people! You’ve seen what they do. No fucking way do you dare suggest to me that hey, maybe they’re not all mindless animals!”

“Lydia—”

“No,” she tells him. “No, because Jackson’s not coming back. My baby doesn’t get to have a father because of what they are. Don’t you _dare_ tell me we’ve been wrong this whole time.”

Her voice is pitched high. It trembles, close to breaking. Her eyes shine with tears she refuses to let fall.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says. “I’m sorry.”

Neither of them sleeps well that night.

 

***

 

In the morning Stiles leaves the basement and finds a dead rabbit at the top of the steps, its neck cleanly snapped.

_“What are you going to give me?”_

But the rabbit isn’t from Peter. Stiles lifts it up, and discovers a folded piece of paper underneath it. He opens it, and his heart clenches at the sight of the familiar handwriting.

_I hope you’re both okay. We miss you. Stay safe. Love, Scott._

 


	9. Chapter 9

It becomes a routine. Every day Stiles fronts up at the old hospital, hands shoved into the warm pockets of his new hoodie, and eyes the sentries warily until the word gets to Argent that he’s here and they let him through. He likes the days when the new guy is there the most. The guy who doesn’t cut him. He’s friendly, but not in a way that makes Stiles’s skin crawl. Not like some of the others who tell him they’ll look after him when the major is bored with him.

Sometimes he has to wait around a few hours in Argent’s rooms while Argent is working on something on his laptop, or at a meeting in the big room down the hall that Stiles thinks was once the staff breakroom. Sometimes he gets the sense that he _knows_ this place, that he knows these rooms, and he almost expects to round a corner and see Melissa smiling at him. Or his mom. Even the color of the walls brings her back to him. Sometimes it feels like Stiles spent half his life sitting in the hospital, waiting. He does the same thing now. When Argent is in his meetings Stiles curls up in the chair by the window and looks out past the dull beige walls into a town that doesn’t exist anymore.

Sometimes he wonders if sitting in Argent’s room alone is some sort of test. Is Argent expecting him to go rifle through his footlockers, to try and crack the password on his laptop, to steal from him? As though Stiles is stupid enough to try something like that, and risk not only a steady supply of ration packs, but also his life.

He sits and waits, and watches the rain patter against the window.

Every day he comes to the hospital. Every day he does what Argent says. Every day he walks back toward the high school and the wolf falls into step beside him.

Every day Stiles wonders what the hell it is between them: the major and the alpha.

Besides _him_.

He’s a conduit, a tether, the copper wire that completes a circuit, and Stiles doesn’t know how to use that yet, but he knows it’s not nothing.

 

***

 

“You’re taking too many risks,” Derek tells Peter one night as they stand on the bluff overlooking the town.

“This used to be such a lovely view,” Peter tells him. “It was like a little model town, all the imperfections smoothed away by distance. At night it was like fairy lights, or fireflies. So pretty, and so ephemeral.”

“You can put the tortured poet shtick away,” Derek tells him dryly. “Cora’s got the betas down in the valley so there’s nobody here to impress.”

Peter’s mouth curls in a smile. “You know what I miss most? Fucking _Dairy Queen_. The real tragedy of war is the lack of Oreo Blizzards.”

Derek huffs in agreement.

There are very few lights in Beacon Hills nowadays. None, in fact, except for the old hospital that’s been repurposed as military HQ. The nights aren’t cold enough yet for the strays to risk lighting fires.

“He’s adopted, you know,” Derek says after a long moment of silence.

“Apropos of nothing?” Peter muses aloud.

“Jackson,” Derek says. “He was adopted.”

“So?” Peter raises his eyebrows. “What he was and what he wasn’t when he was a human is irrelevant. He’s a wolf now. That’s what matters.”

Derek shrugs. “We’re born wolves, Peter. We don’t know how it feels for them. We don’t know how much of a pull they feel for other humans.”

“The others never gave us any trouble.”

Derek shoots him an incredulous look. “The others? Boyd didn’t have anyone, Erica was at death’s door, and Isaac was regularly getting the shit beaten out of him by the other strays. Scott was willing to toe the line to keep his friends safe… and then there’s Jackson.” Derek’s mouth quirks in a quick, bitter smile. “You look at Jackson and see this obstinate child, Peter, but you’re asking him to choose between his pack and his _cub_ , and that’s not fair. Not to a wolf or to a human.”

Peter looks out over the remains of the town again.

“He’s adopted,” Derek repeats at last. “He spent his entire childhood thinking he wasn’t good enough for his real parents. Thinking that there must have been something _wrong_ with him if they gave him up.”

“Perceptive people,” Peter murmurs.

Derek doesn’t take the bait. “He could give up the girl, I think, if you really forced it. If you really doubled down. But not the cub. Not when he knows what it’s like to feel abandoned.”

The wind rustles through the leaves in the trees behind them, and Peter’s skin prickles.

“I thought I told you to watch Scott,” he says at last. “Not to _listen_ to him.”

Derek raises his eyebrows and shrugs in a nonchalant manner that pisses Peter off because that’s _his_ move and Derek knows it. “Turns out Scott’s a pretty smart kid.”

“Is he?” Peter mutters.

Derek smirks.

Fuck him. That’s Peter’s signature move too.

 

***

 

Stiles has got a brightness in him that Peter didn’t notice the first time because he stank of sweat and fear and the entire world was drowned out by the rapid thump-thump-thump of his rabbit heart. Given that it only took the boy a day to demand recompense though, Peter shouldn’t be surprised that within a week Stiles barely smells of fear at all. He’s wary, of course, but he’s too smart to be still quivering in fear.

He knows exactly what Peter wants. And Peter… well, Peter can either detest the boy and all his sharp-minded perceptivity, or he can swallow down his annoyance at his own goddamn transparency and reap the rewards.

“Here,” Stiles says, fingers cold against Peter’s cheek.

Peter turns his face into the boy’s hand, and the scent of Chris—strong, sharp, intoxicating—overwhelms him. His eyes flash and his fangs drop, but Stiles doesn’t flinch away. He holds his hand still as Peter darts his tongue out to taste the traces of Chris’s cum that have dried in the lines of his palm.

Oh, yes.

Stiles know exactly what Peter wants. And now, clever-eyed, he offers it to him.

 

***

 

 _You’re taking too many risks_ , Derek said, and what he meant was Peter coming into town every day, not even bothering to wait until the cover of darkness. Which Peter would argue is only an illusion of safety anyway. Of course the military has night vision equipment. They don’t need the daylight to fix a target on a werewolf’s ass. But of course Peter can also smell them from a mile away. A solider smells different from a stray. Cleaner. And while strays aren’t exactly harmless, they’re certainly easier to fight than soldiers given that they don’t have wolfsbane bullets and tasers.

Peter once watched a rogue omega make the mistake of rushing a group of strays. The humans weren’t as weak and defenceless as he’d presumed. They’d worked together, like a pack almost, surrounding the omega until at last they’d brought him down. He’d killed three of them before he died himself though, so Peter figures it was a Pyrrhic victory at best, but still. A bunch of half-starved humans armed with only knives and bats, and they’d killed a werewolf.

Derek is right to worry, but Stiles only goes out in the daytime.

So that’s when Peter meets him.

 

***

 

Stiles unfolds like an anemone.

He makes noises he tries to swallow down when Peter touches him. At first Peter hardly noticed them, so fixated on Chris’s scent instead of the vessel carrying it. Now though, he likes the way that Stiles’s breath shudders out of him when Peter sweeps his palms over the angles and planes of his body. He likes the bitten-off gasps and moans Stiles makes when Peter nuzzles his skin. He likes the scent of arousal that thickens in the air, and the way Stiles’s twitching fingers hover over his dick as the boy clearly fights to stop himself jerking off while Peter’s scenting him.

There is an unasked question in Stiles’s eyes. _Are you going to fuck me?_

Unasked and, because of that, unanswered too. Peter’s in no rush, and Stiles’s growing arousal amuses him just as much as it frustrates the boy. Peter can take, but he won’t. It will be far more satisfying to have Stiles beg for it.

Stiles really is quite beautiful.

 

***

 

Stiles’s feet drag as he reaches the high school and makes his way carefully through the ruined corridors toward the basement entrance. He doesn’t know how Lydia can stand it, being cooped up in here day by day. His perspective has shifted wildly, he thinks, some time in the last few weeks. But it’s hard to feel terrified of the outside world when he knows that Peter Hale is always somewhere close by, just waiting to fall into step with him. It’s crazy, because he should be terrified of Peter, not feel safer with him at his side. Just because Peter has apparently made the decision not to kill him doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.

But that’s Stiles all over, right? Doing the unexpected, just like Dad always said. The two most dangerous men in Beacon Hills, and Stiles is somehow wrapped up in them both. He should wake up screaming with panic at night. He doesn’t.

The entire world has been tipped upside down, so maybe it makes sense to look for safety in the presence of killers? Just as long as he doesn’t think about what Argent did to his dad. Just as long as he doesn’t think about what Peter did to his friends.

Stiles is halfway down the steps toward the basement when he hears footsteps behind him.

He turns, and his heart clenches.

“Scott!”

Scott shows him a familiar goofy smile.

Scott. _Wolf_.

Stiles stumbles down the stairs, diving over the line of mountain ash and landing heavily on his hands and knees. Lydia is at his side instantly, a knife in her hand as though that will make a difference. Together, they stare at the doorway as Scott appears.

“Hey,” he says, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans. “Are you okay?”

He can’t get over the mountain ash. Jesus, please don’t let him get over the mountain ash, or—

Or they’re dead.

Scott sits down at the bottom of the steps, looking past them into the basement. “Wow. This place seems really good.” He smiles again, but it’s a shaky effort. “Stiles. Lydia. I’m not here to hurt you, okay? That’s not— That’s not who I am.”

“You’re a wolf,” Stiles reminds him, his voice croaking.

“Yeah.” Scott nods. “But I’m still _me_.”

Lydia closes her fingers around Stiles’s wrist tightly. “What do you want, Scott?”

“I miss you guys,” Scott says, ducking his head the way he always does when he’s trying to hide how close he is to crying. “I want to come home.”


	10. Chapter 10

Peter stands in the shelter of the first line of trees, looking across the overgrown field toward the school. He wonders if there is any part of him glad to see it in ruins like this. Surely somewhere inside him there is a sixteen-year-old smiling with glee? Peter had hated school. Not so much for the classes, a few of which were occasionally diverting, but for the ridiculous displays of adolescent posturing. Peter, naturally, was above all that, with his pack of cigarettes and his dog-eared copy of _La Nausée_. Hell was other people, alright. But Peter had also been on the basketball team, surrounded by the popular jocks and, by extension, had been popular as well. He had defied easy definition, and sneered at anyone who’d tried to put a label on him. Stupid children, scrabbling for pack and hierarchy like yappy pups, not even realizing how pathetic it all was. Peter had detested high school.

Not enough to see it turned to rubble though, it turns out.

 

***

 

“Scott,” Stiles says, half-afraid that if he says his name, Scott will vanish. _His_ Scott will, and leave nothing but the monster in its place. It’s there, waiting, just under Scott’s skin. “Scotty.”

Scott hunches over, and Stiles wants nothing more than to reach across the barrier and hug him. It’s his best friend sitting there—his _brother_ —and it’s not fair that some fucking mutation or sickness or whatever the hell it is that’s turned him into a werewolf has the power to destroy everything they were.

They were best friends before the world ended.

Best friends through everything.

When Stiles broke curfew and ran to the McCalls’ after his dad didn’t come home following the shooting, Scott didn’t mind that he suddenly had to share half his food, half his clothes, half his bed. Well, he didn’t have to share half his bed since there was a spare room and everything, but Stiles didn’t want to sleep alone. Months later when Melissa didn’t come back from her shift at the hospital, it had been Stiles’s turn to be the strong one. And when the bombing had started, when they’d had to run, they’d told each other that whatever happened they’d never leave the other one behind.

Lydia’s fingers dig into Stiles’s wrist.

He nods, to let her know he’s not going to do anything stupid. Well, stupider than usual.

“Thanks for the rabbit,” he says.

Scott’s answering smile is tremulous. “’s’okay. I’ve gotten pretty good at catching them.”

Stiles can’t help snorting at that.

“Is, um, is Jackson okay?” Stiles asks.

“He’s, um…” Scott looks at Lydia worriedly. “He gets in a lot of trouble with the alpha and Derek. He’s always trying to get here.” He flinches at Lydia’s expression. “Not to hurt you! But I don’t… I know you don’t believe that.”

“You were there,” Lydia says, her voice firm. “You saw that wolf rip that woman apart.”

“I know.” Scott looks pale at the memory. “But that wasn’t anyone from our p—from the pack I’m with.”

“Bullshit.” Stiles closes his eyes briefly.

Scott’s brow furrows. “The werewolves that find their way to town, they’re not his. He said something once like they’re drawn here, drawn to his territory. Those are the ones who kill.”

Stiles shakes his head. “All wolves are killers.”

“I’m not saying he’s a good guy,” Scott says, his voice low. “He’s an asshole. But he attacks to recruit, not to kill.”

“So what?” Stiles asks. “You sniffed us out just to defend him?”

“I’m not defending him,” Scott says, showing his palms.

“It sounds like it.”

“At least I’m not _fucking_ him,” Scott shoots back.

There’s the cold-water clarity Stiles has been missing. Right there. He lifts his jaw.

“I’m not fucking him either,” he says. “But I am fucking Argent, and Peter knows it. Gets off on it. Some twisted fucking animal thing. Some _dog_ thing.”

Scott’s eyes flash gold and he growls.

Please, please, please let that mountain ash barrier work.

“Stop,” Lydia says, as though Scott isn’t a monster after all. As thought they’re just Stiles and Scott, stress and fear pushing them into a stupid dumb fight like always. “Stop, both of you.”

Scott’s eyes fade back to brown. He looks a little shamefaced when he looks back to Stiles. “Sorry.”

Stiles presses his mouth into a thin line.

“That wasn’t fair,” Scott murmurs.

“No,” Lydia cuts in. “It wasn’t. The only reason we have food and warm clothes is because of Stiles. If my baby is born healthy, that will be because of Stiles. So instead of judging him for doing whatever he can to give us half a chance of making it through the winter, maybe, if you really are still our friend, you can help him find a way to deal with your alpha that’s not going to end up with his throat torn out.”

Stiles curls his shaking fingers through Lydia’s.

Lydia draws a deep breath and frowns at Scott. “What do you mean, the wolves are _drawn_ here?”

 

***

 

Stiles had been more or less carrying a torch for Lydia Martin since third grade, and nothing that happened after the town was bombed could ever change his mind about that. Okay, so Lydia didn’t have hair that smelled of cotton candy anymore—Stiles never did find out what shampoo her mom bought, even after he smelled all of them in the CVS one day—and she didn’t look all pretty and soft anymore. She looked just as dirty and bruised as Stiles and Scott did, and there was a cut underneath her eye that she got during the bombing that left a scar.

At first they thought that someone would come for them, like Scott’s mom or Lydia’s parents. But when the Red Cross trucks came they only took people who lined up for hours and registered their details. And then someone said they weren’t from the real Red Cross, and that they were actually there to take people away and kill them, and Stiles and Scott and Lydia ran away.

They found Danny and Jackson weeks later, trying to catch a dog in the middle school playground, and arguing about whether or not they could eat it if they caught it.

(They never did catch it.)

They stuck together from that day on, avoiding the other strays, and the soldiers. They figured stuff out together, like the best places to shelter and to scavenge. They figured out that they were safer in a group, and they figured out that if they couldn’t fight the other strays off, they had to run like hell.

They did a lot of running.

Sooner or later something was going to catch up to them.

Stiles is surprised it took as long as it did.

 

***

 

“It’s not even me though,” Stiles says. “It’s Argent. He wants to smell Argent.”

Scott bites his lower lip and frowns. He’s inched closer to the barrier, but has made no attempt to cross it. “Scenting is really important. I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but we know things through scent. Like not just where someone’s been, but how they _feel_. It’s weird.”

“Chemical signals,” Lydia says with a nod, like maybe it’s not weird at all.

“It’s like I don’t need to ask how you’re feeling,” Scott says. “I can smell it. And your heartbeat. I can hear if it speeds up, if it skips. Remember that time your dad let the guy from the FBI show us how the lie detector worked? It’s like that.”

“I can’t lie to him?” Stiles asks. “ _You_ can’t lie to him?”

Scott shakes his head.

“Do you want to kill us?” Lydia asks.

“No!” Scott looks horrified at the thought. “The wolf is… it’s complicated. I have like all these instincts now to hunt and fight to protect the pack, but you guys… you’re my friends. You’re my _family_. I would never hurt you. In the beginning it was all crazy, and I didn’t know how to control my shift, but I have an anchor now, and—”

“What’s an anchor?” Stiles asks.

“It stops my wolf from going crazy, I guess.” Scott wrinkles his nose. “It lets me stay in control. I think of my mom, and of you guys, and I stay grounded. It’s hard to explain.”

“Do all wolves have anchors?”

“Our pack does,” Scott says. “The Hales…” He shrugs. “They lived in this town for generations, and nobody ever knew what they were. They had regular jobs. Their kids went to school with human kids. They controlled it. They weren’t _monsters_. They’re not monsters.”

“So he’s just a fucking sociopath then,” Stiles mumbles.

Scott huffs out a small laugh. “I guess.”

“And you’re really okay?” Lydia asks. “And Danny, and Jackson?”

Scott’s expression falls. “Danny’s not in the pack. I don’t know what happened to him.”

Stiles’s throat aches. He swallows.

Scott looks to Lydia. “Jackson wanted to come today, but Peter wouldn’t let him. He says he doesn’t trust him not to do something stupid.”

Lydia looks away.

“Peter sent you?” Stiles asks, the knot in his stomach tightening when Scott nods. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Scott says helplessly. “I don’t know if I’m being rewarded or punished. Or if you are. I can never tell with Peter.”

Yeah. That sounds about right.

Scott tilts his head suddenly, as though he’s listening for something far off that only he can hear. “I have to go.” He climbs to his feet. “Will you guys stay here?”

Stiles exchanges a look with Lydia.

They _like_ the basement.

“I don’t know,” Stiles says. “It depends on if we think you’re telling the truth about not wanting to kill us.”

“You’re my _brother_ ,” Scott says.

The word breaks a dam inside Stiles, and before Lydia can stop him he’s leaping to his feet and— _stupid, stupid, stupid_ —stepping across the mountain ash barrier. When Scott’s arms come around him, Stiles’s heart freezes, but there are no claws, no fangs, just a familiar embrace that Stiles missed so much and never thought he could have again.

The last few months lift off him. The grief, the fear, the loneliness. The weight of it is nothing now that Scott is hugging him back.

Scott’s his brother, and he’s missed him so much.

 

***

 

“What will you give me?” Stiles asked that day.

Peter watches as Scott approaches him across the overgrown field behind the school.

This.

Peter can give him this.


	11. Chapter 11

Stiles wakes up the morning after Scott’s visit with itching eyes and a sore throat. He pulls an extra hoodie on over the one he slept in—thanks, Argent—and opens one of the ration packs to share for breakfast with Lydia. She looks tired this morning as well.

“You okay?” she asks him, yawning.

“Yeah.” He wants about another ten hours sleep, but he’s okay. “Do you think we need to move?”

That was always the deal. If they thought the wolves had found them, they moved.

“I don’t know,” Lydia says. “I don’t know if we can trust Scott. But moving seems kind of pointless, doesn’t it? Peter would just follow you home, right?”

A dog joke. Stiles wants to smile, but this is their _lives_.

“I like it here,” he says.

Lydia looks around the basement, and then snuggles closer to him as they share the pack of crackers. “Me too.”

Winter is coming. The basement is all they have.

 

***

 

“Christopher.” There’s a bark of command in Gerard’s voice that Chris has been responding to since he was a child. He wouldn’t dare do otherwise. The man might be on the other side of the country, but he’s still got the power to make Chris jump to attention.

Chris glances over toward his bed, where Stiles is dozing, and angles his laptop slightly to make sure that Gerard doesn’t catch a glimpse of him.

“Is this a social call, General?”

“Not exactly.” Gerard’s face cracks with a smile. “Do you remember how to hunt, Christopher?”

Chris remembers. He doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t know how to hunt. He is Gerard’s son, an Argent. The Argents have been hunters for centuries.

“What do you need?” he asks.

“I need the last of the Hales removed from Beacon Hills, Christopher. I need them gone from the Preserve.”

Gerard has always hated the Hales. Even before the war. He hated the way they walked around Beacon Hill like they were people, hiding their true nature. Wolves among sheep.

“Walking into the Preserve would be a death sentence,” Chris reminds him. “Four or five wolves could bring down fifty soldiers on their own territory, no question.”

It’s not a matter of firepower. In the woods, the wolves have the advantage. Human technology, for all its wonders, can’t hope to compete with millions of years of evolution. Werewolves are the perfect predator. And soldiers, for all their training, are not hunters.

“After Portland, Congress have given the go-ahead to start testing chemical weapons,” Gerard says. “We pump enough goddamn wolfsbane into the Preserve, along with a defoliant or two, and they won’t be able to run, and they sure as hell won’t be able to hide. They’ll be easy enough to take down after that.”

Chris’s gaze flicks to the bed before he can help himself. “There are still humans in Beacon Hills.”

Stiles snuffles into Chris’s pillow. Chris would like to flatter himself that he’s worn the kid out, but Stiles was fatigued long before he arrived at HQ this morning. Long before he arrived in Chris’s life at all, probably.

“Scavengers,” Gerard sneers. “Strays.”

“What do you need me to do?” Chris asks, dragging his gaze back to his father.

“I need you to be ready to act, Christopher,” Gerard says. “I need you to be ready to finish what your sister started.”

He ends the call.

 

***

 

Chris should remember the day he realized what Kate had done. In the end though, it had been no sudden, chilling revelation. It had been a creeping realization instead, as slow and inexorable as the changing of the seasons. That Kate had been the one who’d killed the Hales and set the whole thing in motion. That Kate had struck the spark that sent the world up in flames.

Or maybe Chris did, twenty-odd years before that.

Peter Hale’s eyes were very blue and his smile was very, very knowing. Chris had fallen into his orbit like it was some place he’d always supposed to be.

“You’re a _wolf_ ,” he’d said the day that Peter had cornered him in the locker room after practice.

Peter had leaned into his space, smirking. “And you’re a hunter.”

That first kiss had lit a fire in Chris.

They met up at school, in the woods, in an abandoned warehouse down on Tanner Street, wherever they could without their families knowing. There was some part of Chris that had aligned like the point of a compass to Peter; spinning, spinning, spinning until he got a fix on him. When they were apart, he was always thinking of how many hours, minutes, seconds it was until they could meet up again.

In the woods one afternoon, as the red and yellow autumnal leaves spiralled to the ground, everything fell apart.

“Who followed you?” Peter hissed suddenly, closing his fingers around Chris's throat. His eyes flashed gold. “Who _followed_ you?”

“I don’t know!” Chris gasped, first at Peter and then at the ground when Peter released him and he dropped to his knees in the leaves. “Peter?”

But Peter was gone.

And Chris’s little sister Katie was watching wide-eyed from the path.

Maybe that’s when it all started instead.

 

***

 

Chris sits down on the bed, making the mattress dip. Stiles rolls toward him, yawning awake.

“Fuck,” he mutters. “I fell asleep?”

“Looks like,” Chris tells him.

Stiles’s mouth quirks in a not-quite smile. “Sorry.”

“Guess you’ll have to make it up to me, huh?”

“Guess I will.” Stiles tumbles past him out of bed, and lands in a sprawl of pale limbs on the floor.

Chris reaches out to cup a hand around his jaw, and Stiles goes still and quiet. The day is overcast, and his eyes are dark. It takes sunlight to make them shine amber. Chris holds his gaze, drinking in the sight of him, sleep still clinging to his edges. His hair is mussed up. There’s a crease from Chris’s pillow imprinted on his flushed cheek.

Stiles licks his lips.

“I want more than that today,” Chris says, and releases his jaw.

Stiles climbs awkwardly to his feet, and crawls back onto the mattress. “Which way?”

“On your back,” Chris says, and stands up to fetch a condom from his footlocker. When he turns around again, Stiles is watching him.

“You don’t have to use that,” Stiles says. “If you don’t want. I’ve never been with anyone else.”

Chris snorts.

“I haven’t.” But Stiles doesn’t argue. Just draws his knees up and holds himself open.

Chris unzips his pants and shoves them down. He climbs onto the bed and lowers himself into the cradle of Stiles’s thighs. Stiles’s skin is hot and flushed. He’s tight when Chris pushes in, and his breath shudders out of him. His eyes slide half-closed, and he hooks his legs behind Chris, heels digging into Chris’s ass.

“Want you to come on me,” Stiles says. “Want you to pull out and come on me to finish.”

Chris plows into him, and Stiles moans and tightens around him. He gets a hand around his dick and starts to jerk himself off in time to Chris’s thrusts.

“Please,” Stiles gasps. “Please. _More_.”

He only ever says things like that when his eyes are squeezed shut.

Chris sometimes wonders where he goes.

 

***

 

The rain sweeps down from the hills, blanketing what’s left of the town. It slams against the window of Argent’s room, and Stiles dresses, shivering at the thought of walking back to the school in this. It’ll be freezing. The rain is heavy too. What if Peter is unhappy with him because the smell washes off?

He takes a while pulling his shoes on, hoping to give the rain a chance to ease.

It doesn’t.

“See you tomorrow, I guess,” he mumbles at last, scooping up the ration packs from on top of Argent’s footlocker.

He’s surprised when Argent falls into step beside him. They head down the steps—this was a fire exit once, Stiles thinks, because everyone inside the hospital used the big, wide elevators—and the rain sounds even louder from inside the echoing stairwell.

Soldiers have tracked mud in all over the ground floor. Their barracks are here, and so is their mess hall, Stiles thinks. He thinks it’s probably the old cafeteria. Sometimes he can hear laughter from down that way, and the scrape of cutlery against tin trays.

What are they doing here?

What are they still doing here?

Aren’t there other places the war is being fought? Shouldn’t they be there instead? If they leave Beacon Hills, so what? So the wolves will win the rubble?

So fucking what?

Peter can be the king of broken bricks and dust.

What does it _matter_?

Stiles’s throat aches, and it takes him three attempts to swallow.

At the front doors, Stiles hesitates. There are three sentries standing close together by the entrance, jostling for space underneath the scant awning of the checkpoint.

It’s going to be a long, cold walk back to the school.

Stiles shoves his hands into his pockets, and braces himself.

“Stiles!” Argent yells.

He looks back to find Argent holding out a khaki raincoat.

Stiles grins in relief, and steps back toward Argent. Shifts his ration packs from hand to hand as Argent buttons him into the raincoat.

“Careful, huh?” Argent tugs the hood up.

Stiles remembers the time he laughed at Argent’s suggestion he wear military gear, which would paint a target on him. Turns out he had a target on him anyway.

Stiles nods though, and pushes away the warmth that rises in him when Argent pulls the laces on the hood snug, and smiles at him crookedly when he does it.

Not that. Not from him.

And suddenly he can’t get into the rain fast enough. Can’t get away fast enough.

“Stiles,” someone says, but it’s not Argent. It’s one of the sentries. The new guy. His hair has been flattened down by the rain, darkened to brown. He’s frowning. “Stiles?”

Stiles spins around. Sees Argent watching, gaze narrow, and Stiles’s stomach flutters in panic.

 _Just you,_ he wants to say. _I wouldn’t. I’m not stupid._ _There’s nobody else._

Nobody but Peter, but Peter doesn’t count, right?

Stiles dodges the hand the new guy reaches out, and hugs the ration packs to his chest. “Back off, asshole.”

 _See_ , he wants to tell Argent. _See?_

He stumbles off into the rain.


	12. Chapter 12

Chris spends the afternoon going over patrol logs and intel reports. Same old, same old, but he goes through them carefully just in case. The position of the military in Beacon Hills is that of an occupier, but, until now, it’s also been a defensive position. They don’t have the manpower to launch an actual assault on the wolves—however many, or few, there are—and some of the soldiers under Chris’s command have never had to deal with a shifted wolf. It’s been months since the last wolf was killed, and Chris knows it was a rogue omega. To hear his soldiers speculating on whether or not it was an alpha—the alpha of Beacon Hills—was ridiculous. They know so little about wolves. Only what propaganda has fed them.

Chris is a hunter before he’s a soldier.

He knows.

He thinks about the call from his father. Gerard has always hated the Hales. It was personal long before it was political. He hates that the Hales had the gall to act like they deserved the same rights and protections as humanity, even though they were monsters. It was something Chris believed too, for a long time, before he met Peter. And if Peter was a monster after all, he wasn’t the sort Chris was expecting.

To break things off the way he did, without even a word…

Chris would have preferred to have his throat torn out instead of his heart, he thinks, but he was seventeen and stupid, and everything is heartbreak at seventeen.

Chris stares out the window, over the ruins of the town. At the edges of the town, leading up into the hills, is the Preserve. It’s invisible in today’s downpour.

Gerard has always hated the Hales, but this talk of chemical warfare? That’s more than hatred is worth, surely? It’s overkill. Not only would a defoliant destroy all the trees in the Preserve, and the wolfsbane kill or weaken the wolves enough to attack, but fuck only knows what it will do to the human population of Beacon Hills. The remains of the town are in the valley. Their water comes from the creeks that drain out of the Preserve. A change in wind direction, and the valley would become a receptacle for whatever fumes are pumped into the Preserve. On cold days like today the mist takes forever to lift. Chris can’t help but imagine it as poison.

There are probably only about two hundred strays living in Beacon Hills. It’s a rough estimate. Nobody really knows. Two hundred is a negligible number, possibly, apart from the fact that they’re human beings. And, in a war started with the stated claim of protecting humanity from monsters, it sickens Chris to think that apparently it’s only _some_ people who are to be saved at all costs.

Stiles, of course, and his pregnant friend, are not amongst those.

Chris wonders if there’s any way to change that.

 

***

 

Stiles thought it would be cold in the rain, but he’s hot instead. He tears the raincoat off a block or two from the hospital and drops it in the mud. He’s hot, and his muscles ache, and he’s supposed to be carrying something, isn’t he? Something important? But when he turns around to look for whatever it is, there’s nothing there, and he doesn’t know where he is anymore.

His throat hurts, and his head does, and crying makes it hurt worse, but he can’t stop.

There was supposed to…

He was supposed to meet somebody?

He’s thirsty. He cups his shaking hands to catch the rain, and drinks it.

He should go to the Sheriff’s Department and wait for Dad.

 _Dad_.

The word is an ache inside him, like an open wound, and he’s sick, but Dad will look after him. Take him home and put him to bed, and give him an aspirin crushed up in a spoonful of honey like he always does when Stiles has a sore throat. The honey makes the aspirin taste less gross, and easy to swallow.

“Dad?” he calls through the rain, but Dad doesn’t appear.

Stiles stumbles, dizzy. He catches himself before he falls.

“Dad?” he asks, and lowers himself down onto his knees.

Dad doesn’t come.

Stiles waits, crying.

 

***

 

When Stiles is three, he rides his tricycle at breakneck speed down the driveway, hits the gutter, and face plants on the road. All the wind has been knocked out of him. He can’t even scream. He doesn’t have too though because suddenly his dad is there, lifting him up and holding him close, and _then_ Stiles can scream, and he does.

His dad takes him into the house, and grabs a pack of frozen peas from the freezer. Stiles holds the peas in his bleeding hands, and presses them against his cheek. He wails and wails and wails while his dad carries him up to the bathroom and uses a pair of tweezers to pick the gravel out of his pudgy kneecaps.

When Mommy gets home from grocery shopping, Stiles is sitting on Daddy’s lap on the couch bandaged up like a mummy. Stiles wanted all the bandages, and all the sympathy. Mommy is too late to help with the bandages, but she has all the sympathy he craves. He gets hugs and kisses and cuddles until he’s giggling again.

That night he has ice cream for dinner.

 

***

 

Dad doesn’t come this time.

Mom doesn’t.

Stiles lies curled up on the road in the rain, and cries because everything hurts.

 

***

 

It was Peter who taught Chris how to lie, he thinks, or gave him a reason to. Chris learned how to look his father in the eye and agree with every word he said, while his rebellious heart whispered the truth. It’s been years since he listened to that traitorous whisper, and felt reckless and heady with his own secret mutiny.

Gerard is dangerous. He’s a zealot. Chris has always known it.

He needs to get Stiles and his friend out of Beacon Hills. The only way he knows to do it is either by conscripting him—something Stiles would never agree to, and his friend’s pregnancy wouldn’t allow—or by sending them to a camp for dissenters. And those camps, Chris suspects, aren’t much better than the life they have in Beacon Hills. It might save them from aconite poisoning in the short term, but what then? A lifetime of imprisonment?

No, there has to be another way.

He wants to save Stiles because he’s selfish. And he wants to save Stiles’s friend because he wants Stiles to be grateful. The girl has to be the key to that, surely?

Chris smiles bitterly at his own delusion.

Why the fuck would Stiles be grateful to him for saving them and letting everyone else die? Saving Stiles isn’t a moral choice at all. It’s purely self-serving, and Stiles would see straight through it. It shouldn’t matter what Stiles thinks. He’s not Chris’s goddamn moral compass. Except Chris sure as fuck can’t trust his own conscience any more, can he?

He’s a fucking masochist, clearly, if he’s looking for some sort of redemption from the kid who fucks him because his only other choice is starvation. Stiles is right to hate him.

The radio on Chris’s desk blasts with static, making him jump.

“Major Argent?”

Chris reaches for the radio. “Go ahead.”

“Sir, it’s Parrish here. Front checkpoint.”

“Go ahead.”

“Sir, I think you need to come down and see this.”

 

***

 

The four soldiers at the checkpoint have their weapons drawn and pointed when Chris gets there. The fifth, Parrish, is standing in front of them, keeping himself between them and—

Peter Hale.

Chris’s heart clenches.

Peter’s standing at the edge of the parking lot, a shadow in the rain. There’s a body in his arms, head lolling back, pale throat exposed.

 _Stiles_.

Chris steps forward, the blood pounding in his skull. “Peter.”

 

***

 

“Please tell me you’re not going to eat that,” Chris says as Peter picks up the injured rabbit in his cupped hands.

“I can control myself, you know,” Peter says haughtily.

Chris snorts. “Remind me again what happened after practice today?”

Peter smirks, cheeks pinking. He holds out the injured rabbit to Chris. “Here.”

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

“I don’t know. Take it to the vet or something.”

“Why don’t _you_ take it to the vet?”

Peter slips the rabbit into the pocket of Chris’s letterman jacket, too quick for Chris to stop him, and then dances away, laughing. “It’s your problem now, Argent!”

“Peter!”

“Aw! Is the big, bad hunter scared of the little bunny?”

“No!” Chris rolls his eyes. “Peter, what the fuck am I going to do with a _rabbit_?”

“Save it,” Peter tells him, his eyes bright. His expression softens into something Chris hasn’t seen before. It’s a kind of gentleness, he thinks. It should look out of place on sharp, sarcastic Peter Hale. It should look fake, but it doesn’t. It looks incredible. The warmth in Peter’s smile is secret, almost shy. “You’re going to save it.”

 

***

  

Peter’s eyes flash red, and he curls his lip to show his fangs.

“You’re the alpha,” Chris says, but he thinks that perhaps he’s always known. Or at least he’s always trusted that the universe would find some way to throw Peter Hale back in his face.

He’s aware of Parrish standing at his side, steady and watchful. He’s aware of the nervous men behind them, weapons drawn. And he’s aware that all of them are balanced on a knife’s edge here.

“He needs a doctor,” Peter says at last, the rain still beating down.

Chris holds Peter’s red gaze.

This will probably be the last thing he ever does.

Chris steps forward to take Stiles.

There’s not much to him, but he’s a dead weight. Peter’s arms brush against Chris’s as he transfers Stiles to his hold. Their shoulders bump together. Such a clumsy moment. A touch that Chris has missed for twenty-odd years, and it’s utilitarian, impersonal.

Stiles makes a small, pained noise as Peter relinquishes his hold at last.

“Chris has got you, little rabbit,” Peter says, his voice low. His red gaze holds Chris’s for a long moment.

Chris tightens his grip on Stiles, and nods. “I’ve got him.”

Peter melts back into the rain and disappears.


	13. Chapter 13

“You fucking idiot,” Derek mutters, falling into step beside Peter somewhere near the old gas station.

Peter inclines his head and shrugs. “What was I supposed to do, nephew? Leave him to die in the street?”

Derek glares at him through the rain. “You could have turned him.”

“No,” Peter says. “I couldn’t.”

Stiles would make a magnificent wolf, no question. His instincts are sharp, even for a human, and he’s _clever_. He’s fearless too, when it counts. The way his dark eyes watch when Peter traces Chris’s scent on his skin, the way he know exactly how to give himself to the alpha… he’s too clever, probably, too quick to figure out Peter’s weakness, but what a wolf he’d make. Peter though, is a very selfish man. If Stiles were a wolf, he wouldn’t be able to cover himself in Chris’s scent anymore. That one surviving link between Peter and Chris—however twisted and fucked-up it is—would be broken. So no, Peter couldn’t have given Stiles the bite.

Derek shakes his head but doesn’t argue the point. Peter imagines it’s because he knows exactly why he could never have turned Stiles.

 

***

 

Stiles’s skin is so hot. Chris carries him inside with Parrish’s help, up to his room. He strips his wet clothes off him, covers him in dry blankets, and summons the doctor. The entire HQ must know by now that the major’s little stray was brought here by a werewolf, by the _alpha_. They must be speculating that Chris has been played somehow, that the boy is some kind of spy.

In which case, Peter has very stupidly just blown his cover.

Chris has no doubts that’s how the gossip will run, but he also knows it isn’t true. If Stiles were a spy, Peter would never have shown his hand. And this is Beacon Hills, not Portland or New York, or even Charlotte. There are no troop movements here, no pushes, no attacks and counter-attacks. There are just two enemies camped out in the ruins, stagnating.

Chris sits at his desk and watches as the doctor works.

He’s bracing himself for bad news, he realizes, his hands clenched into fists.

“Strep throat,” the doctor announces at last.

Chris is a little bemused. He remembers Allison got that once, when she was about eight or nine, but it certainly didn’t seem this dramatic.

The doctor reads his expression. “The associated high temperature is the real culprit here. I’ll give him a course of antibiotics to help clear it up and to stave off rheumatic fever, and he should be fine in a day or two.” He presses two gloved fingers into the glands under the hinge of Stiles’s jaw. “These people… they’ve survived a long time without contact from outsiders. Simple bacterial infections tend to hit them hard.”

When the doctor leaves, Chris sits beside Stiles in the bed and rubs his thumb over the crinkle of tape on the back of his hand. The doctor has given him a saline drip to keep his fluids up. Stiles’s hand is still too hot, but the fever-bright flush on his skin is slowly fading.

The touch brings Stiles into something close to wakefulness, but not quite. He blinks dozily at Chris. “Dad?”

Chris doesn’t answer.

“S’posed,” Stiles mumbles. “Supposed to be there. Not you. Not _you_.”

He closes his eyes and drifts back into sleep.

 

***

 

Chris eats in the mess hall with the rest of his men, and notes the way that conversations die around him, and pick up again as he passes. What a strange world it’s become when saving a boy’s life equals colluding with the enemy.

He wonders why he’s never noticed it before.

After dinner he goes back upstairs to his room and showers. He pulls on a pair of track pants and a shirt and opens his laptop. It takes him a few tries to get through to Allison. The sight of her face, worried and glad at the same time, reminds him that it’s been too long since he contacted her.

“Dad! Is everything okay? Are _you_ okay?”

Chris smiles a little at that. “I’m fine, Ally. But I needed to talk to you about something.”

“Okay.” She leans forward slightly, tucking her hair behind her ears. “What’s going on?”

He tells her about Gerard, about his plan to use chemical weapons in the Preserve. Tells her about the strays, about the two hundred or so people who won’t be given the protection of gas masks or evacuation.

“You’re still working for that woman, right? That refugee advocate your grandfather hates?”

“Mmm,” Allison says. “Braeden.”

“Huh. First name terms and everything.”

Allison flushes, and Chris wonders if there’s more to this story. “You think Braeden can help?”

“I think someone needs to,” Chris says. “These are _people_ , Ally. And if Gerard gets the go ahead to use chemical weapons here, then this won’t be where it stops.”

Allison nods. There’s a hard determination in her expression that she got from her mother. Victoria would be so proud of her, Chris thinks, so proud of the woman she’s become. “Do you have a copy of your orders you can send me?”

“Nothing on paper,” Chris says. “So far it’s all speculation.”

“That doesn’t give me much to work with, Dad.”

“I know. I’m just hoping that maybe you can point your boss in Gerard’s direction. Put some public pressure on whoever’s going to be asked to green light this thing. Shut it down before it starts.”

“I’ll try.” Allison doesn’t look convinced. “But you know how easy it is to label public discourse as dissent. They pull the pro-human card, and they make Braeden look like a traitor. There are already plenty of people out here who’d love to see her shot for treason, and that’s no exaggeration. Particularly after what happened in Portland.”

“I know.”

Allison’s expression softens. “Are you really okay, Dad?”

Chris sighs. “I look in the mirror, Ally, and I don’t like the man I see.”

“Dad.” She blinks, her eyes shining.

“I’m okay,” he says with a small smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got people looking out for me.”

It’s a blatant fucking lie, but he knows it will make her feel better.

“Okay,” she says at last. “I’ll talk to Braeden, and I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

“Okay,” Chris says. “I love you, Allison.”

The faint look of surprise on her face tells him that it’s been too long since she heard those words, but she recovers quickly. “I love you too, Dad. Stay safe.”

 

***

 

Chris falls asleep in the chair by the window and wakes up in the middle of the night when he hears a short gasp of pain. He looks over to Stiles, who’s tugging the needle out of his hand.

“Stiles.”

Stiles stares at him, wide-eyed in the gloom. “I have to go!”

“You’re still sick.”

“It’s dark! I have to go!”

Chris stands up and crosses the floor. Presses his palm against Stiles’s hot forehead. He’s still hot. Chris doesn’t even know if he’s aware of where he is and what’s going on exactly, or still too feverish to be entirely lucid. “You’re still sick. You want to make your friend sick too? And the baby?”

It’s a low blow, probably, but it’s enough to make Stiles sag back onto the bed. He closes his eyes. “I don’t know what…”

“Peter,” Chris says. “Peter Hale brought you here.”

Stiles’s eyes flash open, wide and fearful. “What?”

Chris smiles slightly.

“I didn’t…” Stiles swallows. “He doesn’t fuck me. I wouldn’t. I mean, okay, I probably wouldn’t be able to stop him, but he hasn’t…” He shakes his head. “He only touches me because I smell like _you_.”

Chris cycles through a burst of sudden emotions: anger, guilt, jealousy, hurt. None of them make any sense, and none of them can be untangled from the other. “I’m not angry with you, Stiles.”

Stiles clamps his mouth shut and regards him warily.

Hell, he doesn’t even know if he’s angry with Peter. Angry with himself, probably. He can’t tell what he’s feeling, and hasn’t that always been the way when Peter Hale is in the equation?

“I’m not angry with you,” he repeats. He feels Stiles’s forehead again, and then cards his fingers through his hair. “You’re always going to hate me, aren’t you?”

Stiles goes unnaturally still.

Chris isn’t a good man. He knows that. But he likes to think he isn’t a bad man either, and he has a feeling that whatever Stiles says next is going to shatter that illusion forever.

“I fuck you for food,” Stiles says at last. “I need the things you give me, and I’m not stupid enough to say no. It is what it is.”

“And that’s all it will ever be?” Chris asks quietly, taking his hand away and rising to his feet again.

Stiles’s dark gaze tracks him as he crosses the room again and sits down in the chair. Chris looks away, out the window, out at the dark remains of the town. The rain has finally cleared away and the moonlight is breaking through the clouds. Silver light gleams down on nothing.

When Stiles finally speaks, the words are so faint that Chris almost doesn’t hear them.

And, when he does, he wishes that he hadn’t.

“I have to hate you. You killed my dad.”

 

***

 

Peter follows Scott down the steps of the high school basement. He senses the line of mountain ash before he even sees it: a raised little border that’s as hard as resin.

Clever little humans.

He shouldn’t have expected anything less from Stiles. Or from the girl standing in front of him now, he supposes.

She’s lovely. Fierce and lovely. Pale, red-headed, her pregnant belly swelling underneath her oversized hoodie. She’s holding a narrow-necked glass beaker in one hand, a rag trailing out of it like a wick, and a lit candle in her other hand.

“You must be Lydia,” Peter says with a smile. “Aren’t you _wonderful_?”

“Aren’t you creepy?” she shoots back. Her hands are shaking, but Peter has no doubt whatsoever that she’s fully prepared to light that beaker up and throw it in his face. “What have you done with Stiles?”

Peter lets his smile grow.

“Stiles is sick,” Scott says. The boy never has got the hang of toying with his prey first. “Peter took him to Argent.”

“ _You_ took him to Argent?”

“Carried the little rabbit with my own two hands,” Peter agrees.

“Then why aren’t you dead?” Lydia demands.

“I don’t know,” Peter lies. “Perhaps that’s something you should ask Argent, princess.”

Lydia’s gaze narrows. “You know what, _alpha_? There’s a lot I want to ask Argent, and you too. I am fucking _sick_ of being a pawn in whatever dick measuring contest you and Argent are playing at.”

Oh yes. Peter _likes_ Lydia.

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship, provided she doesn’t kill him where he stands.


	14. Chapter 14

The morning dawns clear and cold. The wind has chased the last of the clouds away. Chris stands and stretches, working the soreness of his muscles away. He slept in the chair.

Stiles is still asleep. He looks better this morning, for all that Chris can hardly bear look at him.

_“I have to hate you. You killed my dad.”_

Is it even true? Probably. A lot of people died in Beacon Hills. At first it had seemed like Chris had a handle on it. Everybody wanted to same thing, after all: to be safe. But then came the curfews and the rationing. Well, those were things the people didn’t like, and suddenly there was trouble. Dissent at first, and then riots and looting, and even attacks on his soldiers. When a group of men had tried to hijack a convoy of supplies, resulting in the death of three soldiers, it had been all the justification the military needed to bomb the town to hell.

The face of the enemy had shifted then. No longer just werewolves, but any humans who opposed the military or the war effort. Chris isn’t naïve. He knows how power works. He knows the sort of men who reach for it in times of war, and who hold onto it tightly at all costs.

His father is one of those men.

It’s not that nobody cared what happened in Beacon Hills, it’s that nobody dared to condemn it openly unless they brought the same wrath down on themselves. Beacon Hills was a short, sharp lesson to the rest of the country. A brutal one, Chris had thought at the time, but necessary.

_“You killed my dad.”_

Afterward, the survivors were carted away by the Red Cross to work camps, because what better ending to the harsh lesson than a display of humanitarianism? To give the dissenters of Beacon Hills a chance to redeem themselves and assist in the war effort?

Chris has always known war is a dirty business, Always thought that somehow knowing it made him better than those who followed orders blindly, but it was never self-awareness, was it? It was hypocrisy, pure and simple. And whatever Chris does now, he will never really be able to make up for all the times he shut his mouth and followed orders, will he?

He smiles bitterly as he watches Stiles sleep.

This isn’t about redemption, is it?

It never was.

Chris doesn’t want Stiles to forgive him.

He wants Stiles to remind him, every day, of all the things he’s done to earn his hatred.

 

***

 

The room is empty when Stiles takes his first shaky steps toward the bathroom. He really needs to piss. He makes it to the bathroom, and is in the shower when Argent finds him, cleaning the dried sweat from his fever off his body.

“How are you feeling” Argent asks him.

Stiles keeps his body angled away. “Better.”

“You’re still sick,” Argent tells him. “You should be in bed.”

“I need to get back to Lydia.”

“Stiles--”

“No,” Stiles says. “I’ve got antibiotics, right? So I’m not contagious or anything? So I’m going to go back to Lydia. That’s the deal.”

“You’re still sick.”

Stiles twists the taps off and steps out of the shower. “I don’t fucking _care_.”

He tried to grab for the towel hanging on the rail by the shower, misses, and stumbles forward.

Argent catches him before he hits the ground.

Yeah, okay.

He’s still sick.

Argent leads him back to bed.

 

***

 

“Why are you telling me all of this?” Lydia asks Peter, her eyes narrowed.

“This is what friends do, Lydia,” Peter tells her with a bland smile. “They _share_.”

Lydia arches her brows.

The candle burned out hours ago, but Lydia has replaced it. And although she might be sitting cross-legged on a gym mat now, the beaker full of what Peter has no doubt are very flammable chemicals is still within easy reach.

They’ve talked all night.

Scott dozed off a while ago, and makes little snorting sounds and he sleeps curled up on the stairs. Peter sits on the bottom step, legs apart, leaning forward, hands hanging into the space between his knees. He’s the picture of relaxation, and he knows Lydia doesn’t buy it for a second.

“Things are changing, Lydia,” he says. “I don’t know yet _how_ they will change, but taking Stiles to Christopher is the sort of tiny action that will cause ripples, do you understand?”

She tilts her head slightly. “Of course. The alpha of Beacon Hills delivered a sick human to the military, and the major in charge didn’t shoot him in the face. Questions will be asked. Assumptions will be made. You’ve just undermined Major Argent’s authority in the eyes of his men, who now probably think he’s a traitor.”

“A happy coincidence, I promise,” Peter tells her. She is very sharp. “Stiles’s welfare was actually my first concern.”

She hums slightly, as though she doesn’t believe that. “But also, maybe some of those soldiers will be asking themselves why you didn’t just tear Stiles to shreds when you had the chance. That’s what a mindless animal would have done.”

Peter smirks.

“What I don’t like,” Lydia says, her expression hardening, “is that you’ve left Stiles with them. Who knows what they’ll do to him if they think he’s a collaborator?”

“We don’t have collaborators, princess,” Peter tells her. “Mindless animals, remember?”

“People have been shot for less,” Lydia says quietly.

“I don’t doubt it,” Peter says, inclining his head. “But I didn’t make this world. I didn’t start this war. I’m just trying to survive it, the same as you.”

Lydia waves her fingers over the flame of the candle thoughtfully, making the shadows jump and dance on the walls of the basement room. When she looks up at Peter again, her eyes are bright. “Why are the wolves drawn to the Preserve?”

Clever.

Peter smiles slightly. “Do you believe in magic, Lydia?”

“Power, possibly.” She purses her lips for a moment. “But not fairytales.”

“The thing in the Preserve,” Peter says. “It’s no fairytale.”

 

***

 

Peter was three or four when he first saw what remained of the Nemeton. He’d been out following Talia, and gotten lost. It wasn’t fair, because Talia was older than Peter and she could do a full shift, and Peter’s stubby little human legs couldn’t keep up with a wolf. So he was lost when he found the Nemeton.

Perhaps it drew him there.

It was a tree stump. Huge. Bigger than any stump Peter had ever seen before. Something more than a four-year-old’s curiosity compelled him to climb onto it. It wasn’t just that it was _there_ , although that reason would have been enough. It was that once he was standing on it, Peter didn’t feel lost anymore. He didn’t feel scared or alone. He felt as though the earth was thrumming underneath his feet, as though he could see the roots of the stump sinking miles into the ground, like a plug connected to a power source. The stump looked like it should have been dead, but Peter had known it was anything but. It was perhaps the most alive thing he had ever experienced.

It was very, very old, and it was very, very powerful, in ways that Peter couldn’t understand, let alone articulate.

Peter suddenly saw _everything_.

Four years old was way too young for an epiphany. Peter still needed help tying his shoes. What the hell was he supposed to do with enlightenment?

In the end he got distracted by a squirrel, followed it for a while, and his mom eventually found him a few miles from the house.

 

***

 

“You have a magic tree stump?” Lydia asks, arching her brows.

“Well,” Peter says, “when you say it like that it sounds stupid. The point is, the Nemeton is on Hale territory, and my pack has protected it for generations. If the humans get it, if they find a way to _use_ it, then forget everything you know about nuclear options. This would be bigger.”

“Oh, so the werewolves want to save us all.”

“No,” Peter says, figuring he at least owes her the truth. “This werewolf wants to save his own sorry hide. Saving yours would just be a coincidence.” He shrugs. “And it’s not just the humans, of course, who would try and wake the Nemeton. Deucalion, I’m sure, would love to get his claws on it.”

“So why hasn’t he?” Lydia asks curiously.

“At the moment he’s busy waging his war,” Peter says. “But as soon as he has a moment to redirect his attention, I know it’ll fall on the Nemeton.”

“If it’s so powerful, why isn’t it his top priority?”

“Because I told him I don’t know where it is.”

Lydia’s gaze sharpens. “Werewolves can’t lie, though.”

“It’s not a lie,” Peter tells her. “I found the Nemeton once, and I’ve never been able to find it again since.”

“Could Deucalion?”

“I don’t know.” Peter feels his stomach twist. “But I’ve learned one thing over the years, and that’s to never underestimate him. With the right druid or spark on his side, who knows?”

Lydia is silent for a long while, and then she smiles. “You really are in trouble, aren’t you, alpha?”

“Excuse me?”

Her smile fades. “Weight of the war on your shoulders, and here you are, talking to _me_. I’m sure that rankles.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, princess,” Peter tells her. “It doesn’t suit you.”

 

***

 

Stiles sleeps through most of the day, only waking up again when the doctor jabs the canula back into his hand and uses more tape than he did the night before to hold it in place. He stays awake long enough to drink half a cup of watery orange juice, and then crashes out again.

Chris works at his laptop and watches him sleep.

 

***

 

Peter likes Lydia. He can see why Stiles is so eager to protect her. He can also see why she and Stiles haven’t yet been turned. They’re smart. Smarter than Scott and Jackson. Smart enough not to be caught when Peter has been in recruitment mode. Maybe not as physically strong, but not everything comes down to muscle.

“Are you going to bring them into the pack?” Scott asks as they head back into the woods.

“No,” Peter says, and Scott’s face falls. “I can’t bite a pregnant girl, Scott, and Lydia’s in no condition to keep up with us.”

Their only strength is in moving, and moving fast. And winter is almost here. The last thing Lydia needs is to be giving birth in the woods in the middle of fucking winter.

“I want you to come back later,” Peter says. “Take her some rabbits, and whatever else you can find. And Scott?”

Scott looks at him hopefully.

“Take Jackson too.”


	15. Chapter 15

Jordan Parrish is on guard duty when he hears the rumbling of the approaching trucks. About time. They were due three days ago, but got rerouted for some reason. Not that Parrish is expecting any mail, but he’s hoping the supplies include some fresh fruit or vegetables. He’s as sick of ration packs as everyone else.

Parrish has been in Beacon Hills for a month now.

Nobody volunteers for Beacon Hills. The place has got a horror reputation, despite the fact that it’s probably safer here than anywhere on the frontline. The wolves keep to themselves mostly, and the strays don’t cause much trouble. Patrols are always dicey, but still less dangerous than in an active combat zone.

Parrish thinks it’s something to do with the town itself. The way the sign outside the bombed-out shell of a building on Main Street still says Sheriff’s Department. They way framed photographs still hang on the exposed walls of houses. The way faded movie posters are advertising upcoming features at the rubble that was the cinema. It doesn’t take long at all to see that Beacon Hills was once just a small town like any other. It doesn’t take long at all to imagine the people who must have lived here, and died here.

Normal, everyday people.

That’s the curse of Beacon Hills, Parrish thinks. That it could have been any town. And, knowing that, it’s impossible to swallow all that bullshit about how everyone here was a traitor, plotting against the government. It takes a special sort of dissonance reduction to be able to ignore that every day.

Parrish can’t ignore it.

He thinks it would have been impossible, even if it weren’t for John Stilinski.

 

***

 

“I’m going,” Stiles says on the third day, and waits for Argent to say something.

Argent nods.

Stiles rubs the bruise on the back of his hand from the canula, and reaches down onto the floor for his jeans. “Thanks for not letting me die, I guess.”

Argent’s mouth turns up in a bitter smile. “It was the least I could do.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “It really was.”

He pauses with his jeans in hand, and takes a breath. Thinks of Lydia, and the baby, and the supplies they need to see them through winter. Thinks of Peter, and the only leverage he has with the alpha. And thinks too, although he hates himself for it, of the way it feels when Argent fucks him.

He drops his jeans on the floor again. “I said some stuff the other night, I think.”

Argent nods.

“Is that going to interfere with this arrangement?” He’s proud of himself for the way the words come out without faltering.

“That’s up to you.”

Right.

Okay.

Stiles nods, and combs his fingers through his hair. “Fuck me, then. I want him to smell you all over me.”

Argent’s face twists with something like anger, and Stiles’s heart skips a beat. For a second he thinks he’s gone too far, but then something settles over Argent’s expression that he recognizes: want. Argent rises from his chair, closing his laptop, and tugs his shirt off.

Skin on skin.

Okay, Stiles can do that. It’s probably better for scent anyway, right? Even if most other times Argent has kept himself pretty much clothed while they fuck. Stiles isn’t sure why. He’s got nothing to be ashamed of. He’s built, for a guy his age. He’s more than in shape. The hairs on his chest are salt and pepper, and it makes him seem more real somehow. Just a man.

And that’s a very dangerous thought.

“No condom,” Stiles says as Argent shoves his pants down. “Want him to _taste_ you.”

Argent lunges at him like a predator.

 

***

 

Stiles rides him. Fingers digging into his shoulders, hips rolling, his gaze fixed on the wall. He doesn’t want to look at Argent. He’s too afraid he might see something in the man’s eyes that is impossible to hate. Each hint of humanity in the man, of vulnerability, doesn’t feel like a chink in Argent’s armor, but in Stiles’s.

This is what it is.

An arrangement.

Stiles doesn’t look at the photograph of Argent’s daughter. There’s no room for dads and kids in this. No room for anything at all except two bodies fucking.

That’s all it is.

That’s all it’s ever going to be.

 

***

 

It’s cold when Stiles finally leaves the hospital. Three days in a warm bed, and he’s gone soft, or this is the first chill of winter. Stiles ignores the sentries—the new guy isn’t there—and hurries out of the parking lot. He’s still a little weak from being sick, but not dizzy anymore. He concentrates on putting some distance between himself and the hospital.

He’s anxious to get back to the school, to see Lydia. Jesus, he hopes she hasn’t moved on. It could take days to find her again, or longer.

“Hello, little rabbit,” Peter says, falling into step beside him.

Stiles shivers. “Hello, Peter.”

“Finally out of bed, hmm?” Peter sniffs the air. “ _Oh_.”

“I want to see Lydia first,” Stiles says, hugging his ration packs to his chest. “I want to make sure she’s okay.”

“She’s fine,” Peter says. “Actually, she’s formidable, isn’t she? Scott and Jackson have been keeping an eye on her.”

“Why would I believe you?”

“Well.” Peter smirks. “What would you like me to swear it on, Stiles? The god I don’t believe in? My dead family? The _flag_?”

Stiles doesn’t even crack a sarcastic smile. He just looks at Peter for a moment, his heartbeat steady. “Swear on Argent.”

“What?”

“Swear Lydia’s okay,” Stiles says. “Swear it on Argent’s life.”

“Stiles.” Peter huffs out a laugh. “I would kill Argent myself, given half the chance.”

“But you haven’t,” Stiles says. “All this time, all these half chances, and you haven’t.”

“It’s going to happen one day,” Peter says.

“But it hasn’t yet,” Stiles repeats. It will, probably. Argent and Peter are set on the same invisible trajectory. Sooner or later, they will collide. At the moment Stiles is the thing keeping them tethered, their point of connection. But Stiles knows they will meet again one day—as inevitable as the dawn—and it will be big, and it will be bloody. He doesn’t think they want to kill one another. He thinks they just won’t know what else to do.

“Fine,” Peter says, rolling his eyes. “I swear on Christopher’s life that Lydia is safe and well.”

“Okay,” Stiles says, his heartbeat quickening. It’s impossible to pick the threads of fear from the anticipation that tightens in him. “Okay.”

They continue on to the house.

 

***

 

It’s so easy for Stiles to lose himself in Peter’s touch. So easy to close his eyes and be some place where only this exists. Peter’s hands, his mouth, his hot breath making Stiles shiver. Peter’s low growl that should speak to Stiles’s primal flight or fight response, but instead twists around to something new. Yes, Peter is dangerous. Could rip his throat out in a heartbeat. But here, in these moments, Stiles is the one holding his leash.

He should be terrified, but he’s not. He’s powerful.

He’s not dumb enough to provoke Peter, not like he did with Argent. Just guides him, fingers trembling in his hair, hot breath and the scrape of facial hair on his skin as Peter scents him, nuzzles him, licks him.

Stiles squeezes his eyes shut and moans as Peter finds a trail of scent across his hip and follows it toward his groin.

“Peter,” he whispers, blunt fingernails scraping Peter’s scalp. “Alpha.”

His legs are shaking by the time Peter’s chin bumps his erect dick, and Peter growls. It is a low, deep rumble that reverberates through Stiles like a shockwave. And then, before Stiles even has time to react, he’s on his back on the floor, and his legs are thrown over Peter’s shoulders.

Peter’s tongue is hot and wet as it laps at his hole.

Stiles’s brain short-circuits, and he doesn’t even know why. This is what he expected, isn’t it? This is why he told Argent not to use a condom, so that Stiles would still be full of his cum when Peter found him. It’s like he set out a trail of fucking sugar, and now he’s surprised there are ants. It’s just… Stiles expected it, but he didn’t expect it to feel so fucking _good_.

Stiles _whines_.

Peter draws back just long enough to loom above him for a moment. “That’s it, sweetheart. Make some fucking noise for your alpha.”

 _An alpha, not_ my _alpha_ , Stiles wants to tell him, but then Peter’s tongue is working its way inside him again, unerring, and Stiles gasps and jerks, tugging frantically at Peter’s hair. And then there’s a finger pushing inside him as well, searching for just that right spot, and Stiles is just done.

He’s fucking done.

He comes, crying out, as Peter sucks Argent’s cum out of him.

 

***

 

“That kid,” Parrish says. “Major Argent’s stray…”

“Gone,” Hooper mutters, looking Parrish up and down. “What? You interested? Pretty sure you’ll find yourself on latrine duty for the rest of your natural life if you put your dick anywhere near that one.”

“I’m not interested,” Parrish says tersely. “His name’s Stiles, right?”

“I don’t fucking know,” Hooper says. “What does it matter?”

It matters because of John Stilinski.

Because he’d hated working in that fucking camp, but he’d known the second he arrived that the only reason he didn’t hate it more was because it wasn’t as violent and wretched as some of the other camps, and it was all down to the man the other inmates called the sheriff. At first Parrish had thought it was a nickname, or some kind of joke, but then he’d met the man and learned that at one time he’d been the sheriff of Beacon Hills, and he was a good man.

Sometimes he got a faraway look in his eye when he watched the kids running around.

“He would have been eighteen now,” he told Parrish one day, his voice hitching. “My boy. My Stiles.”

Stiles wasn’t on any of the trucks the Red Cross drove out of the ruined town. He wasn’t on any list of refugees. He wasn’t in some other camp. Stiles didn’t make it out of Beacon Hills.

John Stilinksi has spent almost ten years mourning the death of his little boy.

The afternoon that Parrish heard Major Argent call Stiles’s name, it was like seeing a ghost.

“You’re sure he’s already left?” Parrish asks, silently cursing his bad timing. “He’ll be back tomorrow though, right?”

“I don’t know,” Hooper mutters. “He doesn’t wear a fucking bell. The little freak.”

Parrish clamps his mouth shut, and nods.

The less interested in Stiles he appears, the better his chances of catching him alone to ask if he’s John’s son, and he knows it’s not going to be an easy task. All of HQ is already buzzing about the fact the stray was brought in by a werewolf—by the alpha—and what that might mean. That he should be shot on sight seems to be the popular opinion.

Parrish wonders if Argent realizes how uneasy his men are, and how quickly that might turn into something more dangerous.

He looks at his watch and counts down the hours until the end of his sentry duty.

There aren’t any fresh fruit or vegetables in the mess hall that night, despite the delivery of supplies this morning.

“An hour it took to unload those fucking trucks,” one of the other guys grizzles while Parrish shovels down another fucking plate of slop. “And you know what was in them? Gas masks. Just fucking _gas masks_.”

Parrish’s gut twists.

 


	16. Chapter 16

Chris gets a text message from Allison that evening. _Hi. Dad. Hope you got the parcel I sent._

Chris smiles at that. Allison hasn’t sent him a care package in years, because he’s told her not to bother. He has all he needs.

He opens his laptop and waits.

The headline hits the front page of the Washington Post within the hour. _War Declared on US Citizens: The Secret Plan to Use Chemical Weapons on Humans._ Chris reads the article, and then closes the browser window. He doesn’t bother go down to the mess hall for dinner. He’s sure it’ll only be a matter of minutes until he gets a call from an apoplectic Gerard.

He’s not waiting for long.

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t cry when he sees Lydia again, but it’s a near thing. For both of them.

“Did you get fatter in, like, _days_?” Stiles asks her.

He can see she’s torn between laughing and smacking him in the head. In the end she settles on a complicated moue and a frown, and then tugs up her hoodie. “Look at this. My bellybutton has popped out.”

“Gross!” Stiles exclaims, amazed, and reaches out to touch.

She smacks his hand away. “You have cold fingers!”

They snuggle up together on the gym mats and tug the blankets over themselves.

They don’t have boundaries, not really. They’ve been living together since they were ten, since the world ended. Stiles has seen Lydia naked more times than he can count, and she can say the same about him. Puberty was pretty fucking awkward at times. There wasn’t room for privacy. And in the summer, when it rained, well, maybe that would be the only chance to get really clean for weeks, so they’d all strip off and scrub away as much dirt and grime as they could. The boys would try and turn their backs on Lydia while still keeping watch for soldiers, or other strays, or wolves, but it wasn’t a foolproof system. Skin was most definitely seen.

Then, when they were older… the number of times Stiles and Scott and Danny had to pretend they didn’t hear Lydia and Jackson having sex? When they were only a few feet away?

Yeah. Awkward.

And then, when Stiles was the only one left, he’d known he’d have to be the one to help deliver the baby. The thought terrifies him, and it has nothing to do with awkwardness anymore. What if something goes wrong?

He thinks of Argent—Argent has doctors—and his heart skips a beat. Dangerous. _Too_ dangerous, though? Because is something goes wrong with the delivery and Stiles didn’t ask for Argent’s help, he’ll never forgive himself.

But women have been giving birth to babies for millennia without doctors and hospitals, right?

Fuck. He’s so sick of being scared, and of not knowing what to do.

“Peter Hale visited me while you were sick,” Lydia says at last.

“ _What_?” Stiles almost throws the blankets off them as he jerks back. “Did he threaten you?”

Lydia snorts. “He could comment on the weather and make it sound like the threat. But, surprisingly, no. He wanted to tell me where you were, so I didn’t pack up and run, I guess. He brought Scott. And then he let Jackson come.”

“What?” Stiles’s heart beats faster. His last interaction with Jackson was feeling the guy’s claws against his throat. He swallows, and tastes bile. “Jackson?”

“Apparently Jackson has been having trouble with control,” Lydia says.

It’s Stiles’s turn to snort. Jackson’s always had a short fuse.

“I know, right?” Lydia says. “ _Quelle surprise_.”

Stiles laughs despite himself.

“Scott says Peter was worried Jackson might hurt us, so he didn’t let him come sooner,” Lydia says. “I’m pretty sure Peter wouldn’t have given a fuck if Jackson tore us to shreds a few weeks ago, and that it’s probably some werewolf pack hierarchy bullshit. Anyway, Jackson must have finally kowtowed and made all the right noises, so he’s been visiting.”

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.” Lydia sighs. “He sits on the other side of the line, and I keep thinking I’m talking to a ghost. I want to touch him, but it’s not just my life I’m risking, is it?”

Stiles spreads his fingers over her belly. “No.”

“How did you do it?” Lydia asks. “When you hugged Scott, how did you know he wasn’t going to kill you?”

“I didn’t.” Stiles throat aches, and it has nothing to do with strep. “I don’t think it was an act of trust or anything. I just… I just wanted that hug more than I wanted anything else in that moment.”

“Even more than to live?”

Stiles blinks away tears. “Lucky I didn’t think about it, right?”

“Yeah.” Lydia laces her fingers through his. “Lucky.”

 

***

Stiles wakes up some time in the middle of the night. The basement is lit by the soft, low light of candlelight. It takes all the hard edges off and makes the basement seem almost homey.

There are two figures standing in the doorway, just on the other side of the line of mountain ash.

An embrace.

Lydia is resting her head on Jackson’s shoulder. Her eyes are closed. Jackson’s arms are around her. His cheeks are damp.

Stiles feels like an interloper, a spy. He tries to draw the blankets back up without being seen, but the small movement catches Jackson’s attention. His eyes flash gold for a moment, and then he meets Stiles’s gaze and holds it.

“Thank you,” Jackson whispers.

Stiles nods.

 

***

 

In the morning Stiles and Lydia check the containers on the roof. There’s been no rain overnight, but enough mist and dew to collect a little water in the tubs. Lydia fills Stiles in on the Nemeton while they work.

“Peter has a magic tree stump?” Stiles asks, confused.

Lydia quirks her mouth. “That’s what I said.”

 

***

 

“I don’t want to go back,” Stiles admits after they’ve carried the water back down to the basement.

Lydia looks at him, but doesn’t say anything. What is there to say?

“It’s not all bad,” Stiles says, face heating up. “Like, not in the way you might be thinking? The sex is good. Like, um, in all the ways. I just don’t like not having a choice.” He catches her look. “And don’t tell me I can choose not to go, Lydia. It’s gotten way past that. It’s not even a matter of ration packs now, is it? It’s this weird thing with Argent and Peter. I mean, Peter would be pissed, right? If I didn’t go back. And the last thing we need is a pissed alpha werewolf who knows where we live.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Lydia says, eyes wide. “That I wish you hadn’t needed to do it in the first place?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s true,” Lydia says. “But, also, it’s too late. You’re in this mess now, so we need to focus on making sure you’re _safe_.”

“I am,” Stiles says, chewing his bottom lip. “I _think_. But that’s the thing. If I wasn’t, what difference would it make? I can’t back out. Not with Peter in the mix.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“I mean, are you sure it’s only Argent that Peter wants you for?” There’s something in her gaze that Stiles finds unsettling.

He looks away. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

They don’t talk about it again.

 

***

 

“There’s a goddamn leak,” Gerard growls.

Third call today. The old man is pissed. Chris nods, his expression tight.

Braeden’s name was kept out of the article, but how long will that last? The second she’s named as the source of the leak, the second Gerard will know exactly where to look. He’s never been happy with Allison working with Braeden and her refugee advocacy program. Anyone that views the war with anything less that patriotic fervor is a traitor in Gerard’s eyes.

“It’s not all bad news,” Chris attempts, his voice even. “This will give you a chance to concentrate on Portland, won’t it?”

Gerard huffs. “Fuck Portland. Beacon Hills has always been what matters, Christopher. _Always_.”

Chris has heard some variation on that theme for years. Before the war even, when hunters and wolves fought this ancient battle in secret. He’s always thought it was personal, somehow, not _tactical_. Is it possible he was wrong?

There’s an itch at the back of his skull.

Why is he _here_?

Why is _he_ here?

Chris is a hunter. He knows werewolves. He’s always thought he’d be more use on the frontline, somewhere where the battle is still being fought instead of a place where it’s already been won. It’s never made any sense for a hunter of his experience to be stationed here, but Chris has always assumed that Gerard, in his own way, was as territorial as a wolf and that Beacon Hills was _his_. That as long as there were Hales in Beacon Hills still, Gerard wanted an Argent to be the one to take them down.

He listens to Gerard rage on, and wonders now if he’s somehow been wrong all this time.

 

***

 

Stiles approaches the checkpoint at the hospital nervously. He keeps his hands out of his pockets. Keeps his footsteps evenly paced. The sentries are rougher with him than usual. New guy isn’t here. They pat him down for weapons, and, when he holds his hand out, dig a blade across his palm roughly.

Blood blossoms.

His skin doesn’t knit.

He’s human. Still human, and a stray. Bottom of the food chain, just like always.

“Go on, then,” one of the soldiers says. “Go and earn your keep.”

“Whore,” one of the others says.

The word slides off like it’s nothing. Stiles has heard worse from these assholes before. They don’t know him. They don’t know what it’s like to live in the rubble. It doesn’t matter what they think.

Maybe, in another life, Stiles wouldn’t be doing anything like this. If the war hadn’t come, maybe he would have graduated high school by now, and maybe be in college? The idea of it is as vague and indistinct as it was when Stiles was a little kid and people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“An astronaut,” he said some days.

On other days, “A rock and roll star.”

“A _fireman_ ,” he told his dad once, and Dad clutched at his shirt and pretended to have a heart attack. He dropped onto the floor and rolled around and everything.

“A fireman? Not a sheriff?”

“They have cool red trucks, Dad!”

So maybe he didn’t know when he was a little kid, but he was sure he’d be something.

Not _this_.

Not nothing.

A sudden thrumming sound in the distance, low like the faint rumble of thunder, makes him stop before going inside. The sentries are looking too, shading their eyes as they look into the sunlight.

The noise grows louder, and then Stiles sees them, silhouetted against the bright sky.

Helicopters.

Five of them, coming in low.

Stiles heads inside the hospital.

 


	17. Chapter 17

At the edge of town, in the cover of the trees, Derek watches the helicopters fly in, and growls under his breath. It’s been a long time since Beacon Hills saw any real action, and Derek knows that whatever Peter has stirred up now with Argent and that Stiles kid, it’s all about to go to hell.

He hears a rustle in the bushes beside him, and looks around to see Cora watching too.

She looks younger than her years suddenly, fearful, and Derek thinks of the little girl she still was when all of this started.

He motions her over, and she tucks herself in under his arm.

They stand like that, quietly, for just a minute or two, and then Derek straightens up again.

Time to get back to the betas. If a fight is coming, they need to be ready.

 

***

 

“What the hell is this?” Chris demands, heading for the roof. “Why the hell wasn’t I informed?”

“Sir,” the lieutenant says, face drawn, “I only knew ten minutes before you did, and your radio was switched off.”

Their boots thump loudly in the stairwell.

When the lieutenant pushes the doors to the roof open, it’s loud. Chris steels himself against the noise, and against the blast of wind, hot and dry, as the first of the helicopters lands. The others circle like insects in Chris’s periphery, in a holding pattern.

The man who steps out of the helicopter isn’t necessarily physically intimidating—he’s old, white-haired—but he’s got a gaze as sharp and precise as a laser. It locks onto Chris, and the old man’s thin mouth turns up in a smile.                                                               

“Major,” the old man says, striding forward.

So that’s how he’s playing it. Chris salutes. “General.”

Gerard laughs, and claps him on the back. “Good to see you again, son.”

“What are you doing here, Dad?” Chris asks, hoping his father’s goodwill is enough to steer them both safely through this conversation.

Gerard’s smile widens into something unpleasant. “Like I always say. If you want a job done properly, you damn well do it yourself.”

Chris exchanges a look with the lieutenant, and they both follow the general back inside.

 

***

 

“Stiles?”

Stiles keeps his head down as he slips through a wall of khaki-clad soldiers, but sneaks a quick look. It’s the new guy. All wide-eyed and earnest, like some sort of fucking Boy Scout or something. Stiles doesn’t know what that means, but he doesn’t trust it. He can only imagine one type of interest the guy has, and it doesn’t match that expression at all.

He wouldn’t though, right? New guy wouldn’t be that stupid. Stiles belongs to Argent, and the guy’s gotta know that.

Stiles rounds the corner to the stairwell and pushes the door open.

The guy follows him in, the heavy door slamming shut behind him. “Stiles!”

“Back off,” Stiles tells him, gripping the rail.

“My name is Jordan Parrish,” the guy says, one hand held out toward Stiles like he’s a spooked animal he’s trying to soothe.

Stiles backs up the steps. “I don’t give a fuck who you are.”

“Stiles,” Parrish says, his hand shaking as he reaches out toward him. “Please don’t run.”

Stiles is absolutely gonna run. No fucking question.

“Stiles, I think I know your dad.”

 

***

 

 

Chris hates having Gerard in his room. The place has never felt like home, until suddenly his father is poking around in it, violating his space, and it turns out Chris is as territorial as a… well, as territorial as a damned werewolf. His father’s inspection of his modest quarters makes him itch. He can’t help his gaze flicking to the bed, and the sheets and blankets that are still rumpled from sleeping last night. The sheets and blankets he knows would smell like Stiles if he buried his face in them. Soap and sweat and cum. Jesus, he hopes the old man’s nose isn’t as sharp as his gaze and he doesn’t think Chris is still jerking off like some teenager who’s just discovered his dick.

“Drink?” Chris asks, opening one of his footlockers and pulling the bottle of whiskey out.

Gerard gives an approving hum, and sits himself in the armchair by the window. He doesn’t look outside, but Chris doesn’t mistake that for guilt. He figures Gerard got his thrills when the helicopters were coming in to land. He’s always been a man satisfied with destruction.

There was a time when Chris thought that’s how victories were calculated as well.

Chris pours his father a drink and walks the glass over to him. “I thought Congress hadn’t authorized a chemical weapon attack yet.”

“Straight to the chase,” Gerard says approvingly. He sips his drink. “And they haven’t. Which means now is the perfect time to strike. The animals won’t be expecting it.”

Chris pours himself a drink too, and marvels at the way his hands don’t shake. “Which means it’s also illegal.”

Gerard laughs, a dry, barking sound. “Nobody’s going to care about that when it wipes those dogs out where they stand.”

The worst part is, Chris thinks as he swirls the whiskey in his glass, is that Gerard is probably right.

 

***

 

There is suddenly no air in the stairwell, and Stiles can’t hear anything over the roar of blood in his skull. It’s louder than the helicopters were. Stiles grips the handrail of the stairs tightly, because his legs won’t hold him. He sits down heavily on the cold steps and stares at Parrish.

He can’t breathe.

“No,” he says at last, his voice a thin rasp he barely even hears. “No.”

Parrish takes a step toward him, and then crouches down on the steps so that Stiles is taller again. He keeps distance between them, like he’s afraid that if he breaches it, Stiles will lash out or run.

Would he? Stiles doesn’t know.

The flight zone. Stiles remembers trying to befriend a cat when he was younger. A _stray_. Except he could never get close to it. There was a zone of a couple of feet around the cat, and if Stiles even got a toe inside that magic boundary, the cat would flee.

Oh god.

And now here he is, shaking fingers still wrapped around the rail, ass planted on the step, thinking of cats and flight zones and things that don’t _matter_ when the blood is pounding in his skull now, his pulse as loud as a thunder, and he doesn’t know why Parrish would say something like that, why _anyone_ would. It’s not fair. Not fair to strip away all those years like they’re nothing, and reduce Stiles in seconds to the terrified little kid inside. Leave him cold and shaking.

Stiles holds onto the rail. Without it, he’ll get dragged away, drowned in the maelstrom, smashed to pieces on the rocks. He can see Parrish’s mouth move, but the words take a little longer to reach him:

“Is your dad’s name John Stilinski?” Parrish asks him. “Was he the sheriff?”

Stiles can still trace the edges and contours of his dad’s badge in his mind, just like he used to when he was a kid.

“My dad is alive?” he asks, skull buzzing, skin prickling like it’s suddenly the wrong size. Like nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.

“He’s in a camp,” Parrish says. “Outside Bakersfield.”

“My dad,” Stiles says, staring at the pockmarked concrete steps. He swallows and it hurts.

“Your dad,” Parrish repeats. “John. He talked about you a lot.”

A strange sound caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob tears out of Stiles’s throat and he claps his free hand over his mouth.

“Stiles,” Parrish says, reaching out his hand again.

Stiles pulls himself to his feet, and staggers backward up a few steps. “Don’t. I can’t—”

Parrish holds his gaze.

“I can’t,” Stiles repeats, and doesn’t even know what he’s talking about anymore, what it is he can’t do. All he knows is that it’s too big, too much, and he can’t allow him to believe this, to have this be a thing that exists, because it’s too much, too sudden, and—

And it doesn’t make a fucking difference.

It doesn’t change the past.

It doesn’t change _anything_.

“I can’t,” he says, shaking his head as he stares back down at Parrish. “Not now.”

He turns and flees up the stairs, throat hurting, tears blinding him.

He just needs…

He needs Argent. Needs to dig his fingers into his throat, pull him close, and demand to know if it could be true. Argent will know. Argent will be able to find out for him. Stiles’s heart hammers in his chest. He won’t have to… won’t have to _hate_ him if it’s true.

God. It can’t be true though. Because Argent deserves to be hated, for all the things he’s done.

He pushes his way through the doors on the third floor, the thin worn soles of his shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor. These shoes that Stiles dug out of the lost and found box in the high school, laughing with delight that nobody had discovered them before. And they _fit_.

He remembers going shoe shopping with his dad after his mom died. Dad wasn’t as good as it as Mom. He didn’t know he was supposed to pinch the end of Stiles’s shoes to make sure his toes had all the room they needed. He didn’t know he was supposed to make Stiles walk up and down the shop until he was absolutely sure the shoes were comfortable. He didn’t know that he was supposed to make Stiles jump up and down and wriggle his toes. But he knew the important stuff, like stopping for Baskin Robbins before leaving the mall.

He wants that again. He wants his dad. He wants, just once, to feel as safe as he did when he was a kid, holding his dad’s hand tight and knowing that Dad would always protect him.

Stiles doesn’t want to think of his dad right now. Not when it’s not his dad’s arms that are about to be wrapped around him.

Stiles opens the door to Argent’s room, and realizes too late that the major isn’t alone.

There’s an old man sitting in the armchair by the window. He’s wearing a uniform too, and his gaze narrows as it fixes on Stiles.

“Who’s this?’ the old man growls.

“He’s nobody.” Argent’s expression is impossible to read. “Just a local kid who helps out around the place.”

The old man laughs and swirls his whiskey in his glass. “I wasn’t born yesterday, Christopher. I know a whore when I see one.”

Argent’s mouth tightens into a thin line for a moment. “Go, Stiles,” he says. “Not today.”

Stiles retreats.

He imagines he can feel the old man’s stare for a long time after he’s gone.

 

***

 

“I don’t have what you want,” Stiles says, throat tight and eyes stinging when Peter falls into step beside him.

Peter lifts his nose and sniffs the air. “What happened, little rabbit?”

“He was busy.”

Peter arches his brows. “I meant with you.”

Stiles can’t answer.

Peter doesn’t herd Stiles off the path into the ruined house they use today. Instead, he walks him all the way back to the high school and, when they get there, curls his warm hands around Stiles’s cold fingers.

“Stiles?” he asks, and Stiles lifts his heavy gaze in time to see Peter’s mouth curve into a smile. “Keep your eyes open, hmm? When you’re at the hospital.”

“Okay,” Stiles says. His voice hitches, but he knows there’s no trace of a lie in his heartbeat.

Peter Hale has just asked him to be a spy, he thinks.

Really, Stiles is surprised it took one of them so long.


	18. Chapter 18

“Stiles, _run_!”

John jerks awake, his blanket stained with sweat and the tendrils of the nightmare still on him. It’s not dawn yet. The barracks is dark still. The bunk above John creaks, canvas stretching, as Marco rolls over. In the next bunk over, John can hear Larry snoring.

Good.

He hasn’t woken the whole place with his nightmare.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

It happens to at least one of them every night.

He doesn’t sleep again.

He lies awake until the bell outside rings, bringing in another day of labor in the camp.

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t sleep that night.

He doesn’t tell Lydia why.

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t _matter_ if his dad is alive, because there’s no way out of Beacon Hills and there never will be.

His tears are cold on his cheeks.

 

***

 

“I’m hearing interesting things, Christopher,” Gerard says the next morning as they join a patrol on the ruined streets of Beacon Hills. There’s no movement, apart from a couple of strays over near the old supermarket. They vanish the second they hear the soldiers. Chris thinks they’re probably living somewhere close by.

Chris scans the ruins, out of habit more than anything else. The strays are no threat, and the wolves aren’t stupid enough to blunder into a patrol that’s fully armed with wolfsbane bullets. Unless…

His skin prickles. Unless they already know that Gerard is here and he’s too big a target for the wolves to resist?

That thought doesn’t disturb him as much as it should, probably, but the streets are quiet.

“Interesting things?” he asks, because ignoring bait like Gerard’s would be as suspicious as snapping at it.

Gerard kicks a piece of brick with his boot, sending it skittering across the remains of the street. “I hear your little whore runs with wolves.”

Chris somehow manages not to flinch He’d been expecting Gerard to make the connection with the leak to the Washington Post and Braeden and Allison. Which was foolish, probably. Half of HQ has been looking at Chris sideways since Stiles was delivered to his door by Peter Hale. He wonders how many of the think he’s a traitor.

“He’s a stray. I imagine he’s got the same arrangement with them that he does with us.” He keeps his voice even. Uses words that put distance between him and Stiles.

Them. Us.

Not _Peter_. Not _me_.

Gerard’s expression is unreadable. “A collaborator. That’s unacceptable.”

“He’s not a collaborator,” Chris says, and reaches for the only thing he knows Gerard will approve of. “He’s a _whore_.”

He catches one of his soldiers looking at him. The guy looks away when Chris spots him. Parrish, he thinks.

“For whatever reason, the wolves let the strays live,” Chris says, lowering his voice slightly. “It’s always possible he could be a good source of intel against them.”

“I’m sure they could say the exact same thing about him,” Gerard growls.

Chris thinks of all the times he’s left Stiles alone in his room, with reports, with his laptop. All the times he’s let the boy make his own way from the entrance to his rooms, and back again. Stiles is clever enough to have used that, if he’d wanted. Has he, though? Chris doesn’t know.

Gerard huffs. “And they do more than let this one live, don’t they? The goddamn alpha brought him in for medical attention. That tells me that the little slut is more than just coexisting with the wolves, Christopher.”

Chris’s stomach roils, but he keeps his expression bland. Gerard’s got his sights on Stiles now and it’s Chris’s fault. Peter’s fault too. “If the boy was a spy for the wolves, the last thing the alpha would have done was delivered him to us in full sight,” he says. “The alpha’s playing us, that’s all. Sowing suspicion. Wanting the men to speculate. If the boy was truly valuable to him, the last thing he would have done was bring him to us.”

Gerard grunts. “Maybe.”

Chris needs to make sure that Stiles is turned away the next time he comes to the hospital. Needs to get him off Gerard’s radar for as long as this takes, except—

Except if there’s no way to stop Gerard’s attack, Chris also needs him close, to make sure he’s saved. The last thing he wants is for Stiles to hunker down in whatever bolthole he and the girl live in while the gas rolls over the remains of the town.

He also needs to get word to Allison to make sure she and Braeden, and the press, know that Gerard is already in Beacon Hills. Chances are if he does that, then Gerard will know exactly where the leak comes from though.

Gerard takes a few steps away, his back to Chris as he surveys the ruins.

Chris rests his hand on his sidearm, and wonders…

No.

And not because he doesn’t want to do it, but because it’d only end with his own men shooting him in return. Gerard’s team is still back at HQ. Even if Chris ended him here, it wouldn’t stop the attack.

The patrol forms up again, and they turn back toward HQ.

Chris is sure he can feel the unseen strays watching them as they move away.

This is about more than just Stiles.

It has to be, or Chris isn’t the man he wants to be after all.

 

***

 

Deucalion’s voice crackles on the radio, and Peter has to strain to pick the words out of the sudden burst of static. “I hear you have visitors, Peter.”

“We had helicopters,” Peter replies. “I don’t know yet who was on board.”

“Goodness, how have you survived as long as you have without cultivating at least one or two human spies?” Deucalion asks, and Peter rolls his eyes. “It’s Gerard Argent, just so you know, and if the Washington Post is correct, he’s there to burn the Preserve to the ground.”

“He can try,” Peter growls.

“Oh, he most certainly will.” Deucalion sounds almost delighted at the prospect, but he’s always had an unholy love of unnecessary bloodshed. Provided it isn’t his. “And from what I hear, he’s carrying something that will make Agent Orange look like fairy dust.”

Peter’s blood runs cold.

“He’s coming for the Nemeton, Peter, and he’ll destroy every tree in your precious Preserve to uncover it. There will be no more Hale territory, and no more Hale pack either.”

Peter closes his eyes. The day is sunny and cool. In the distance, he can hear Derek and the betas training. Isaac’s laughing, and that’s a rare sound indeed. He clenches his hand around the radio. This is how it feels to make a deal with the devil. “How soon can you be here?” he asks.

“I’m already on my way,” Deucalion says.

The radio goes dead.

 

***

 

“John!” Larry calls, shouldering his way through the dinner line-up. “Sheriff!”

John and his unofficial deputies are always around when it’s time for food. That’s when fights are most likely to break out. There are shortages more often than not, and John makes sure the kids and the older people eat first. Sometimes he hates himself for doing the work of the camp guards for them, but Bakersfield isn’t John’s first camp. Before this he was in another camp. What started as a complaint over low rations ended in a riot and the deaths of twenty-four people. John can’t let that happen again.

John nudges Cassidy on the shoulder to get her moving. She’s a sweet kid. Born in the camp, poor thing. She’s got dark eyes that remind him a little of Stiles, on the days he can let himself remember. “What is it, Larry?”

“New sign-ups came in,” Larry says, tugging his tattered jacket around his shoulders.

Signs-up. The military asking for “volunteers” from the camps. Usually the work is dangerous, and the payment is only a couple of checkmarks on some list in the nebulous corrections system that promises a dissenter is working hard to rehabilitate himself. They dangle freedom like a shiny lure, but John’s never seen anyone earn it yet, but he’s seen plenty of people die trying.

“The sign-ups are a con, Larry,” John reminds him. “It’s the grunt work they don’t want to waste their own guys on.”

It’s clearing asbestos, or working with hazardous substances, or anything, basically, where there’s a high chance of mortality. John thought Larry knew better than to show any interest in that. They’re both too old and too jaded to think a work detail like that could lead to anything good.

“I know, Sheriff,” Larry says. “But this isn’t the usual job. Well, it is, I guess, but…” He draws a deep breath. “They’re asking for materials handlers, in Beacon Hills.”

John shakes his head and laughs.

All these years telling others not to throw their lives away for the same fucking government that imprisoned them, and what’s John going to do?

He meets Larry’s gaze and finds it as steady as his own.

John has to go back.

There might not be any answers to be found after all these years, but John can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else. If that’s the last thing he can do for Stiles, the last way to be close to him—to die in the same place he did—then John’s going to do it.

 

***

 

Stiles approaches the hospital slowly, and sees that Parrish isn’t on sentry duty. He tugs up the sleeve of his hoodie, exposing the scabbed-over lines from old cuts, and hopes these guys won’t feel too much like following protocol today and giving him a new one.

“Not today,” the sentry tells him, and for a moment Stiles thinks he’s getting a pass on being cut, but then he realizes he’s being told to leave.

“What?” he asks, frowning.

“Not today,” the sentry repeats. “Get the hell out of here.”

Stiles nods, and jams his hands in his pockets. He turns away again, shoes crunching on the gritty surface of the old parking lot. He and Scott used to play ball here sometimes, until Melissa came out and yelled at them for almost getting run over.

“Hey!” the sentry yells.

Stiles stops and turns.

The sentry gestures him back. His radio crackles with static. “Change of plan. You’re wanted after all.”

Stiles holds his hand out, and winces as the sentry draws a blade shallowly across the fleshy part of his palm.

Except it’s not Argent waiting for him when he steps inside the hospital.

Well, it’s not the Argent he’s expecting.

The old man’s eyes brighten, like a sharp-eyed bird who’s just spotted a helpless worm. “Stiles. I think we need to have a little talk.”


	19. Chapter 19

Chris is surrounded by men he doesn’t trust, and who don’t trust him. They haven’t since Peter brought Stiles to the hospital. No doubt Peter would find that terribly amusing. Chris wonders if he would even grasp the danger. Chris is the only man standing between the Hale pack and chemical warfare, and even then, he only one man.

He almost wishes he hadn’t told the sentries to refuse Stiles entry today.

Maybe it’s time to be the traitor they all think he is. Maybe he should have let Stiles in, run his hands over that pale skin for an hour or so, risen to the challenge in those dark eyes. He could have sent Stiles on his way with a couple of ration packs, and a warning for Peter Hale: _Get the hell out of the Preserve_.

It wouldn’t help the strays at all, but at least Peter and his pack would survive.

Chris stares at his laptop screen and wonders when the hell that even became something he wanted. Peter is the enemy, after all. It makes no difference that, once upon a time, a boy and a wolf met under a canopy of leaves and made impossible promises.

He emails Allison: _Gerard is here, and means to go ahead without Congressional approval._

It will leave an electronic paper trail, of course, for anyone who looks.

Eleven tiny words.

It’s out of Chris’s control whether they mark him as a traitor or a hero.

 

***

 

The old man sits Stiles at a table in an otherwise bare room, and gives him a juice box. Stiles didn’t even know they made juice boxes anymore. He fumbles with the straw a few times before he manages to stab it into the juice box.

The legs of a chair scrape against the floor as the old man sits down across from him. He smiles as he watches Stiles drink, and then he puts his elbows on the table and leans forward. “My name is Gerard Argent. Have you heard of me?”

Stiles doesn’t think so. “Um. You’re the major’s…?”

“Father,” Gerard answers.

That means he must have lived in Beacon Hill once too, right? Stiles wonders what he thinks about when he looks at the destruction the war has made. That’s almost a euphemism, isn’t it? The _war_. The war isn’t some force of nature like the tide or the seasons. The war isn’t some ravenous beast that nobody can control. The war is made up of actions of men like the Argents. It was men who caused the destruction.

“I don’t know who you are,” Stiles says. “Sorry.”

“That’s quite alright, Stiles,” Gerard says. His smile is not a nice smile. “I’m much more interested in who _you_ are.”

The juice is cold in Stiles’s gut. “I’m nobody.”

“Don’t be modest,” Gerard says, his smile vanishing. “The alpha brought you here when you were sick. You’re something.”

Stiles fiddles with the straw and his face burns. “I just, um, just do stuff for food, that’s all.”

“You _do_ stuff?” Gerard asks. He leans forward, staring at Stiles intently. “A boy like you, old enough to join the military, and you’d rather fuck dogs for scraps?”

Stiles moves his shaking hands onto his lap. “I have a friend. She’s pregnant. I can’t leave her.”

And he wouldn’t. He’d never join the fucking military. Not after what they did to his town, to his life, to his father. But Gerard Argent doesn’t need to know that. Strange, how on that first day he blurted it all out to the major, almost dared the guy to shoot him, but he hasn’t got the guts to do it Gerard now. Because there is something legitimately terrifying about Gerard. Something that chills Stiles to the bone. It’s that smile, he thinks. Gerard is the sort of man who looks around at the world he made and is _pleased_.

“Maybe you’re just a coward,” Gerard says.

Stiles knows better than to argue with that.

“My son tells me you’re not a spy,” Gerard continues, looking at Stiles with his head on a slight angle. “He’s probably right.”

Stiles swallows, his throat dry despite the juice.

“Of course, you’re still dangerous, aren’t you?” Gerard asks, tapping his fingers on the table. “Don’t get me wrong, Stiles. I’m not the sort of man who’s naïve enough to think soldiers, even my own son, have no use for something marginally pretty to fuck. I’m not as old as that!” He barks out a laugh and Stiles wants to vomit. Gerard’s eyes shine coldly. “But I also like to think I can tell when a distraction becomes a complication.”

Stiles clenches his jaw to stop it from trembling.

“And I think you, Stiles, are a _complication_.”

“I’ll go,” Stiles says. “Please. I’ll go and I won’t come back.”

“And I’d let you,” Gerard says, “if only you weren’t also useful.”

Stiles shakes his head. “No, I’m n--”

“Stiles.” Gerard cuts him off. “I’m going to need you to tell me everything you know about the alpha of Beacon Hills.”

“I don’t.” Stiles swallows again. “I don’t know anything.”

Gerard leans back in his chair. “That’s what we call a starting position, Stiles. Let’s see if we can change that, hmm?”

He reaches forward before Stiles can even register it, grabs Stiles by the hair, and slams his face into the table. Stiles feels a burst of pain so intense it flares white in his vision, and then there’s the sudden, sick taste of blood everywhere.

Gerard tightens his grip in Stiles’s hair. “Now then, let’s start over. What can you tell me about the alpha of Beacon Hills?”

 

***

 

Derek is unhappy. It’s his default emotional state, but for once Peter doesn’t take any joy in needling him about it. Instead he’s as tense as Derek.

“This is a mistake,” Derek tells him.

The pack is patrolling the Preserve, but everyone is within howling distance. Peter can feel them. The benefit of his unasked for alpha power. His pack are like a shifting pattern around him, like pieces being moved on a board, and Peter knows where each one of them is. He can feel Erica’s nerves. The girl is always itching for a fight, and Peter is afraid she’s finally going to see one. Boyd is a calmer presence. Stoic, solid, loyal without question. Isaac is anxious; the promise of violence hits him hard as always, even though he’s stronger than he’s ever been in his life. Jackson and Scott are close together, the bonds of their human friendship doubled into a pack bond now. Twice as strong, Peter likes to think, but then remembers Stiles and Lydia and thinks no, not stronger, just _different_. Cora is magnetic north on Peter’s internal compass, Pack, but also blood. Family. Her father was away on pack business when she was born. Peter held her first, and that first rush of recognition, of pure fierce love, has never faded.

“If Deucalion gets his hands on the Nemeton, he’ll kill us,” Derek says.

“I know that, Derek,” Peter says. “And if Gerard unleashes his chemical weapons, we’re also dead, and Gerard will have the Nemeton instead. So here we are between the devil and the deep blue sea, and I picked the devil. What else would you have me do?”

Derek has no answer to that.

The chemical weapons are the most immediate threat, and there’s a slim chance that Deucalion might actually bring enough reinforcements to launch an attack on the hospital before Gerard has a chance to use them. And then?

Fuck knows.

Just another bridge Peter will cross when he comes to it.

Or throw himself off.

 

***

 

Chris tucks a fresh bottle of whiskey into the crook of his arm and heads for Gerard’s quarters. Gerard has commandeered most of the old oncology ward on the second floor. Chris uses the pretence of a friendly visit to scope out exactly what Gerard and his team are working on. A large room has been given over entirely to what appears to be maps. Maps of the Preserve, divided into grids as precise as those from an archaeological dig. There is a woman writing coordinates on the grids. She’s wearing a patch on her uniform that even Chris doesn’t recognize. Who the hell _are_ these people?

They move around the maps like insects drawn to the central chamber of the hive. Busy little drones and workers, set to a common purpose.

Chris hears two of the helicopter pilots discussing a new aerial delivery systems. Hears someone on the radio demanding to know when their chemical handlers will arrive from the camp.

A man walks around the room, around the large maps laid out on the tables in the middle of the room, in synchronous orbit with Chris. The man is not wearing a uniform. He is holding a book. His gaze is unreadable as it slides from the book, to the maps, and to Chris. No uniform, and a bland expression, but something about the man reeks of…power? Chris thinks of the way electricity flickers in the sky as storm clouds roll in.

Chris moves on.

He finds Gerard’s room eventually. It’s empty. Chris leaves the bottle of whiskey on his footlocker and retreats again.

 

***

 

Peter hunkers down in the lobby of the old Beacon Hills Saving and Loan. He had an account here once, he thinks. Now the place is a handy shelter to watch the comings and goings from the hospital. Two patrols have already passed, right on clockwork. Clockwork is a terrible way to structure patrols, of course. Christopher is clearly getting lazy in his old age.

The lobby smells of damp and rats. Peter ignores those scents, and focusses on a sweeter one: Stiles. There’s a faint hint of the boy’s scent, no more than a few hours old, trailing all the way from the high school to the hospital.

Stiles is there, but Christopher must be taking his sweet time with him today. Peter wonders what pretty messages Christopher will leave on his skin for him.

Of course Peter is here to make sure the boy gets back to the high school basement safely, given that not only is Gerard Argent in town but Deucalion is also on his way—but why shouldn’t Peter get to enjoy Stiles as an added bonus? Peter deserves nice things—just ask him—and Stiles is one of the nicest things Peter has seen in a long time.

And there it is. This old charade that Peter plays as much for himself as for any audience: the one where Stiles means nothing to him. When clearly that’s no longer true, and possibly never has been.

Peter lifts his head to try and catch a hint of the boy’s scent on the air.

It’s still faint. It’s still been hours since Stiles passed by this way. It’s not like him to take so long.

Peter doesn’t like this at all.

 

***

 

At the checkpoint at the hospital, Parrish checks his watch.

Stiles is late today.


	20. Chapter 20

Once, when Stiles was about thirteen or fourteen, he got cornered in an empty house by a bunch of other strays who thought he was trespassing on their territory. Later he managed to drag himself back to whatever shithole they were staying in at that time, and Danny and Scott spent the whole night dabbing his bruises with water that was icy-cold from the downpipe still clinging to the back of the house, and Lydia strapped his ribs so they didn’t hurt as much when he breathed, while Jackson watched through until dawn to make sure nobody had followed Stiles back.

That beating then…

Well, it’s got nothing on _this_ beating.

Those strays? They’d clearly had no fucking idea what they were doing, whereas Gerard seems to know exactly where to plant a fist for maximum effect. He’s not even out of breath when he’s done.

Stiles curls up on the floor when it’s over, and drifts. It might be minutes. It might be hours. He can’t really tell.

He just got the shit beaten out of him by an _old man_.

It’s ridiculous, and when he laughs he dribbles blood and spit all over the floor.

 

***

 

By late afternoon, Stiles still hasn’t turned up to the hospital. By change of guard, when the evening is darkening into night, he hasn’t either. Parrish is starting to worry. What if he’s scared the kid off by mentioning John? Worse, what if something’s happened? Stiles lives between the military and the wolves, and that must be a very narrow and unforgiving space.

Parrish is on his way back inside when he sees movement at the edge of the parking light.

A figure emerges out of the gloom.

At first Parrish thinks it’s Stiles, but a quick glimpse disabuses him of that. It’s a girl, for starters. She’s wearing a green hoodie. Her very pregnant belly, in stark contrast to the rest of her, is pressing against the fabric tightly. She’s wide-eyed and skittish as a fawn as she approaches the checkpoint.

Hooper notices her too, and laughs. He whistles at the girl. “What’s his name, sweetheart? Whatever he told you, he’s not interested anymore!”

“I’d do her,” one of the other guys says. “Not like she could get knocked up twice.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Parrish asks them. He reaches into his pocket to see if he’s still carrying around his protein bar from lunch. It’s not much, but… He takes it out of his pocket and holds it up so the girl can see it.

She nods at him, and hugs her arms around her thin body. Jesus, she looks really young as well.

“She can still suck, right?” Hooper yells as Parrish steps toward the girl.

Parrish ignores him.

There’s a recess in the hospital wall about fifty feet away from the checkpoint. Parrish thinks it’s an old ambulance bay or something. Parrish has seen guys meet there with strays before, put them on their knees there. It’s dark enough now to be almost private, and the guys back at the checkpoint lose interest quickly enough.

The girl looks fragile and brittle, her pale face pinched pink by the cold.

 

“I don’t want anything from you,” Parrish tells her in an undertone as they head toward the ambulance bay.

The girl turns her wide gaze toward him, her hands twisting nervously in front of her.

“I just want to, um, to make sure you’re not hungry,” Parrish says. He holds out the protein bar as they step into the shadows of the old ambulance bay.

The girl’s expression changes from wide-eyed ingénue to watchful predator immediately. She plucks the protein bar from his fingers, and lets it drop to the ground. “Oh, I bet that’s what they all say.”

Parrish reaches automatically for his sidearm. Before he can get to it, large warm fingers dig into his wrist and wrench his arm up behind his back. Another hand circles his throat from behind, and a chill runs through Parrish as he feels the prick of claws against his jugular.

The girl’s eyes glitter in the gloom. “Make a noise, and he’ll kill you.”

The wolf laughs lowly somewhere close to Parrish’s ear.

The girl meets Parrish’s gaze. “Where’s Stiles, asshole?”

 

***

 

A lock turns, and the door opens, and Stiles squints up at the man standing in the doorway. It’s not Gerard. He’s not even in a uniform. The man steps forward into the room, and closes the door behind him. He kneels down on the floor in front of Stiles.

“Are you a doctor?” Stiles tries to ask, but the words are mangled. The shape of his mouth is all wrong.

The man seems to understand him anyway. He pulls on a pair of blue plastic gloves, and feels behind Stiles’s ears. Like, looking for a skull fracture or something? Stiles has no idea. Then he checks Stiles’s nose, and taps his fingers up his jaw. Then he gently peels Stiles’s swollen bottom lip back, and makes a slight hissing sound.

“Messy,” he says almost apologetically when he catches Stiles’s gaze. “But nothing too serious, I don’t think.”

A doctor then.

“Can you sit?” the man asks him.

Stiles nods, and the man helps him sit up and lean back against the walls.

The man presses his hands against Stiles’s ribs. “Take a deep breath for me.”

Stiles obeys. It hurts, but there’s no stabbing pain.

“Good,” the man says. Stiles knows better than to believe his kind tone. “I don’t think anything’s broken.”

Stiles would have told him that. He only grunts and closes his eyes. His head is throbbing.

He tries to think back to the questions Gerard asked, and to the answers Stiles blurted out in terrified response. He told him the alpha’a name was Peter Hale—the guilt that flooded through him when he’d named him had taken Stiles by surprise, but he doesn’t think it was anything the old man didn’t already know. Stiles couldn’t tell him anything useful. Couldn’t tell him where the pack was hiding, couldn’t tell him how many of them there are.

He’s glad.

He’s glad he doesn’t know those things, because he’s pretty sure he would have blurted them right out. And Stiles doesn’t owe a damn thing to Peter Hale, but he sure as fuck knows one thing for certain. Whatever complicated things he feels about Peter, there’s nothing complicated about what he feels for Gerard: hate.

Pure, simple, unequivocal hate.

“I’m not sure how long he’s going to keep you here,” the doctor says. “I’m sorry.”

He actually sounds genuine. Maybe he is. Who knows better than Stiles that sometimes people have to do things they don’t want in order to stay safe?

He opens his eyes again, and finds the doctor staring at him intently. As Stiles watches the doctor reaches into his jacket and pulls out a book. He opens it. It’s in no language Stiles recognizes. There’s a little piece of a dried plant stuck between the pages. The doctor takes it, and holds it out.

“What?” Stiles mutters. Talking pulls at the dried blood around his mouth and nose, and makes everything feel gross. “What is it?”

It looks like a four-leaf clover.

“It’s called raskovnik,” the doctor says. “Take it.”

Stiles does. “Is it medicine? Do you want me to like, eat it?”

“No,” the doctor says with a laugh. “It’s said that it unlocks things. It’s supposed to be very lucky. You look like you could use a little luck.”

Weirdo.

Stiles inspects the little dried clover, and slides it carefully into the pocket of his hoodie as the doctor stands up again. “What kind of a doctor are you anyway?”

“No kind of doctor at all.” The man smiles slightly and opens the door to leave. “I’m actually a vet.”

 

***

 

John sits in the second truck in the convoy, bouncing and lurching with every bump on the road. It’s dark. The canvas on the back of the truck is pinned back, and the road is illuminated in the occasional sweep of headlights of the vehicle following theirs. He doesn’t recognize this strange ruined moonscape. Quick glimpses aren’t enough to reconcile this place with the memories of the town he’d loved. He doesn’t know whether to be glad of that, or horrified.

The gears grind; the convoy slows as it takes a corner.

The lights of the tanker behind them bounce over a pile of bricks and rubble, and illuminate a half destroyed sign: _lls Sheriff’s Department_.

John puts a hand over his mouth to stop a sudden sob escaping him.

 

***

 

“Stiles isn’t here!” Parrish rasps, wincing as the wolf’s claws dig into his throat. “He didn’t come today!”

“He’s not lying,” the wolf says, voice as low as a growl. “He’s mistaken, but he’s not lying.”

The red-haired girl purses her lips, and for a second Parrish thinks that she’ll condemn him to having his throat torn out with just a nod. She’s as terrifying as the wolf.

“What do you mean mistaken?” Parrish asks.

The wolf’s breath is hot on the back of his neck. “Stiles came here today. I can smell him.”

Shit.

“What?” Parrish asks. “That can’t be right.” He tries to focus, to not succumb to panic. “I can go back inside. I can find him for you. I can get him to safety.”

“Or you can tell the rest of them we’re here,” the girl says, flicking her hair back. “Kill him, Peter.”

Parrish’s stomach twists.

“He’s not lying, princess,” the wolf—Peter—says, the amusement evident in his voice.

The girl levels a challenging stare at Parrish. “Why would you want to help Stiles?”

“I’m his friend!” Parrish exclaims.

Claws dig into his throat, breaking the skin. “Now that’s a _lie_.”

“Okay! Okay, I hardly know him, fine!” Parrish closes his eyes, sure that this is it. “I know his dad! I know John!”

“Truth.” The claws retract, and dull fingertips dig into Parrish’s throat instead.

The girl frowns.

“Truth,” Peter repeats, releasing Parrish suddenly.

Parrish steps back and hits the wall. He rubs his throat, smearing blood. He turns his head warily, to finally get a look at the wolf who grabbed him.

He shouldn’t be surprised.

It’s the same one who carried Stiles to the hospital when he was sick.

It’s the alpha.

“I can get him,” Parrish says. “I can get Stiles.”

“Good,” the alpha says, his eyes bleeding red. “Because if you don’t, I will hunt down every person you have ever cared about in your life, and tear their still-beating hearts out of their bodies. Do you believe me, soldier?”

Parrish’s heart thumps wildly. “Yes.”

The alpha smirks, his eyes glittering red in the gloom. “Truth.”

 

 


	21. Chapter 21

Stiles dozes on and off, and has really weird dreams. He must be a wolf in his dreams because he’s walking through the Preserve--something he’s never done in real life apart from a very brief stint in the Cub Scouts when he was nine. Stiles had never done well with organized activities. He told his dad he was quitting after three weeks and his dad, after accepting the vase Stiles had made him by sticking bits of magazine pictures on an empty jar, had diplomatically agreed it might not be the best use of Stiles’s time. Still, that stupid vase had remained on his dad’s desk right up until the bombs fell on Beacon Hills and their house was destroyed.

In his dreams, Stiles isn’t a kid, and he’s not afraid of the Preserve either. He wanders through it, butt naked, and he’s not afraid.

He wakes up on the floor, his head aching and his skin coming out in bruises, and he’s thirsty. It’s been forever since Gerard gave him a juice box, and he’s not expecting another one any time soon.

It takes him a while to get to his feet. He shuffles to the door, and rattles the handle. It’s locked. Stiles remembers the plant the vet gave him, and wonders if he believes in fairytales enough. He pulls it out of is pocket and waves it in front of the door. He even jabs the stem in the lock and wiggles it around for a while, but nothing happens.

Well, why the fuck would it, really?

He sits at the table for a while, rolling the stem of the plant between his thumb and forefinger. He can’t remember what the vet called it. Some weird name.

Jesus. He just wants to leave. He’s no use to Gerard. He doesn’t know anything worth knowing. He just wants to leave, and go back to the basement in the high school and read textbooks and poke at Lydia’s gross bellybutton.

Maybe he should never have approached Major Argent. Except, wherever it’s led him, it’s pretty hard to regret the last few weeks of ration packs. Sure, ration packs _and_ werewolves, but werewolves aren’t the monsters that everyone says they are. Peter’s a lot of things, but he’s not a mindless animal. And neither are Scott and Jackson. They’re different now, but unless they’re also really good actors--and Stiles _knows_ them--there’s nothing in them worth fighting a war against.

It’s not fair. Some stupid war that Stiles never signed up for, and it’s destroyed his entire life.

He thinks of that stupid vase he made his dad all those years ago, and of how it belongs to another world now. A world where it was incomprehensible that something like this could be the future. Stiles lived it, and he’s still not sure how the fuck it happened.

Stiles gets up from the table and paces for a while, testing his acing muscles. Then, with nothing else to do, he curls up on the floor again and dreams of trees.

He doesn’t wake up again until the door opens.

It isn’t the vet this time.

It’s Gerard.

 

***

 

Chris hates not knowing what’s going on inside his own HQ. There’s a lot of activity in the oncology ward, but nobody’s telling him what’s going on. Chris only knows as much as the rest of his men, and that’s not a lot at all. He’s in the mess hall when he gets word that there’s a convoy approaching, and takes himself out to the back of the hospital to watch it arrive. Five trucks and a tanker, rolling in through the darkness. His blood runs cold when he sees the tanker.

“Out!” a guy bellows, banging on the side of one of the trucks. “Get out!”

A group of about a dozen people clamber out of the truck. Men mostly, but there are a few women in the group. They’re all wearing the orange coveralls that mark them as coming from the work camps. Jesus. Whatever’s in that tanker must be dangerous as all hell if Gerard won’t even risk his soldiers working with it. Camp workers, however propaganda likes to package the program as rehabilitation, are nothing more than cheap, expendable labor.

The soldier ushers the camp workers inside, as a group of heavily armed soliders make their way toward the tanker and take up positions around it.

Chris fixes his attention on the tanker again. There are no markings on it. No hazmat signs giving any clue as to what’s inside. Chris can’t shake the feeling that he’s at a crossroads here, at a pivotal point in history. Like some guy standing on an airfield on an island in the Pacific, watching a bomb get loaded onto the _Enola Gay_.

He feels sick.

He goes back inside. Clearly Gerard’s team isn’t going to tell him what’s going on, and they aren’t asking for help either, which might have given Chris a little leverage to get some information. Gerard has his own men guarding the tanker. Chris might even call it paranoia, except that’s always been Gerard’s way. Knowledge is power, and Gerard hates sharing it. Even with his own son. Even with Kate, and she’d been the favorite.

Chris is way past feeling bitter about that.

It mattered, once, but that was in another lifetime.

 

***

 

Peter Hale slumps down in the seat next to Chris in homeroom, totally uninvited.

“Ugh,” he says.

Chris’s heart beats a little faster, and he hates knowing Peter can tell. “Rough night?”

He doesn’t even know why he’s talking to the guy. Not when he knows what he is.

“Full moon last night,” Peter says, and smirks.

“Right.” Chris fiddles with his pen.

Peter leans back in his chair and stretches. His shirt rides up, showing off a trail of hair down his abdomen. It makes Chris’s face heat up, which is dumb. He and Peter are on the same team. There have been locker room showers before. This, somehow, feels more intimate. Maybe because it was accidental?

Then he glances up at Peter’s face, and the asshole is smirking again, and Chris realizes that no, it wasn’t accidental at all.

“Wanna cut your next class and come and smoke behind the bleachers with me?” Peter asks.

“I don’t smoke,” Chris mutters.

Peter leans in close and lifts his nose like he’s looking for Chris’s scent. “I know.”

Twenty minutes later Chris’s knees are weak, and his head is swimming, and his dad is going to kill him if he ever finds out, but he can’t bring himself to tell Peter to stop. He just tangles his fingers in Peter’s hair while Peter blows him, and knows that whatever this is, he’ll never be able to end it.

 

***

 

When Chris gets back to his room, there’s someone in it.

“What the hell are you doing in here?” Chris demands.

It’s the new guy. Parrish, going by the name stitched on his uniform. Chris makes it a point to know at least something about every man or woman under his command, but there’s nothing in Parrish’s service record that really stood out. An average young guy. A couple of years of service. No disciplinary issues that Chris is aware of. So why the fuck is he in Chris’s room?

The guy takes a step back. “I was looking for someone.”

Chris glances around his room. Everything appears undisturbed, but it’s impossible to tell. And there is no way in hell some random soldier would think it’s okay to walk into the major’s room. It’s the most ridiculous excuse Chris has ever heard, which makes him want to know what the guy was actually looking for. Intel? Is he a spy?

Chris doesn’t know whether or not to call for the MPs on his radio, or just punch the guy right in the face and worry about getting his answers later.

“You want to try that again, soldier?” he asks.

“Stiles,” the guy blurts out. “I was looking for Stiles.”

Chris feels rage building up inside him. “You’ve got no business with Stiles. Do I make myself clear?”

“I’m looking for him because I think he’s in trouble,” Parrish says.

And that gives Chris pause for thought. “Why would he be in trouble? He’s not even here.”

“I got told he was,” Parrish says. “Sir.”

Chris narrows his eyes at him. “Who told you that?”

For a second he thinks Parrish isn’t going to answer. The indecision is written all over his face. And then he straightens up and pulls his shoulders back. “Peter Hale, sir. The alpha.”

Chris’s stomach twists.

There are things he should be focusing on right now, probably. Like the fact one of his soldiers has apparently been in contact with Peter. Like the fact the man standing in front of him has just volunteered the information that he’s colluding with the enemy. Like the fact that not only should Chris be calling the MPs right now, he should probably throw together a firing squad as well. Those are all the things he should be focusing on.

They aren’t.

“What do you mean Stiles is here?” he asks instead.

 

***

 

“I don’t know anything,” Stiles whimpers when someone hauls him to his feet. “Please. I don’t.”

“Stiles,” a voice says.

Stiles opens his eyes, blinking in the harsh light. “Chris?”

Argent’s face is drawn. There’s blood on his uniform, on his hands. That might be Stiles’s blood, actually.

“I’ve got you,” Argent says. “Can you walk?”

And then Stiles is slung between Argent and…and Parrish? They’re supporting him as they move. Stiles sees everything in flashes. This feels exactly like the time he was nine and fell off the roof, and ended up having to stay overnight in hospital because he got a concussion.

They’re in a basement hallway, he thinks, because there are no windows, and there are stairs.

Stairs are _hard_.

And then it’s just Chris holding him up, whispering at him to be quiet, and from somewhere close but faraway at the same time Parrish is talking to someone and laughing. And then he’s back.

“Sent the guard for a cigarette break,” Parrish says, and they’re moving again, through a door, and into the darkness of the night.

Voices.

“Lydia?” Stiles asks.

“Stiles!”

And Peter is there too, and how is that even possible? There’s growling, and it’s not just from Peter either.

“Don’t,” Stiles manages, peeling his eyes open again to find both Argent and Peter staring at him intently. “Just fucking _don’t_ , okay?”

And Peter curls his hand around the back of Stiles’s neck, and it’s warm, and it feels nice, and he actually doesn’t hurt as much anymore. And then he doesn’t hurt at all, except he’s still a little woozy, but he manages to sit up.

They’re in a house.

The house that Peter brings him to. Stiles recognizes the pictures on the wall, the old couch, the ruined carpets. Lydia and Parrish are hovering close by, both wearing identically worried faces, and Argent and Peter are kneeling on either side of Stiles, and this may just be the weirdest fucking thing that’s ever happened to him in his life.

The major and the alpha.

Enemies, with Stiles between them.

Stiles doesn’t know what to do.

Doesn’t know which one of them to reach for, which one to push away.

“Don’t,” he says again, his voice more certain this time. “Don’t fight.”

He closes his eyes and reaches out for both of them.

 


	22. Chapter 22

“Don’t,” Stiles says, his bloody fingers twisting in Chris’s shirt. In Peter’s too, he sees. “Don’t fight.”

Chris meets Peter’s eyes.

_Don’t fight._

Jesus. If only that were an order they could follow. That the whole world could. Because Chris is so fucking tired of fighting.

 

***

 

Peter lifts a hand and wraps it around Stiles’s wrist, drawing the last of his pain away, but he holds Chris’s gaze while he does it. Those eyes. Those blue gray eyes that always saw too much, knew too much. Peter likes to pretend it was the fact Chris was a hunter that drew him toward him first. He liked the thrill of flirting with danger. That’s what he told himself, even back then, but it was always more than that. It was Chris’s eyes. When he was younger, they shone with earnest goodness, and Peter wanted very much to shake Chris’s moral foundations to the core. It wasn’t that Chris was a hunter, it was that he thought being a hunter was a noble thing.

Well, that shine has definitely gone now. There’s nothing in Chris’s gaze except weariness and regret.

Peter can probably match him in that, he thinks.

Chris’s heartbeat is steady, strong. His scent makes Peter want to lean in closer, press his mouth against his throat and just _breathe_. It makes him want to forget the war, the destruction, the past twenty-odd years of missing him, and nuzzle up to him like a goddamned pup.

“Christopher,” he says, letting his eyes bleed alpha red. “It’s been a while.”

“Peter.” Never let it be said that Chris can’t growl like a wolf.

“Don’t,” Stiles says from between them, his heartbeat skipping. “Don’t.”

“We’re not fighting, little rabbit,” Peter says, mouth turning up in a slight smile. He breaks Chris’s gaze to look at Stiles. The boy is wide-eyed. “This isn’t fighting.”

“Okay,” Stiles says. “No dick measuring either, please?”

Chris snorts out a tiny laugh.

“Thank you for saving me,” Stiles says, looking between them.

Like there was any other option, Peter thinks, and wonders if Stiles knows that. He rubs his thumb along the soft skin on the underside of Stiles’s wrist, feeling his pulse flutter. “We wouldn’t have it any other way, little rabbit.”

Stiles’s eyes widen, and then he looks to Chris, as though waiting for Chris to deny it.

“Apparently there are some things we still agree on,” Chris says softly. He draws a deep breath. “Peter, you need to get your pack out of the Preserve.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Peter asks, keeping his tone even.

“Gerard has some sort of chemical attack planned, and—”

“I know,” Peter says.

Chris looks surprised. “You _know_?”

“Deucalion told me,” Peter says, enjoying the man’s shock. What? He’s not allowed a tiny moment of victory here? Fuck knows it’s going to be the last one for a long time. Possibly forever. “Oh dear. Is your security not everything you thought it would be? Did some little spy sneak right through it? How embarrassing for you.”

“Peter,” Chris says. He closes his eyes briefly. “You need to go. You need to take your pack and run, because I don’t know if I can stop this.”

Stiles’s pulse thumps wildly against Peter’s thumb.

“I’m not leaving,” Peter says.

Peter, what—”

“He has a magic tree stump,” Stiles says suddenly. “And your father wants it.” He pales suddenly, and his scent sours with fear as he turns to Chris. “He’s going to kill us too, isn’t he? He’s going to kill _people_ , because he wants a fucking tree stump!”

“The Nemeton,” Chris sighs, and passes a hand in front of his eyes. “Jesus. I thought that was just a myth.”

“Oh, it’s very real, Christopher,” Peter tells him. “And powerful enough to destroy _everything_.”

Stiles surprises him with a sudden sharp laugh. “What? Like there’s even anything left to destroy?”

“There’s you, little rabbit,” Peter tells him. He sometimes forgets how small Stiles’s world is. So is Peter’s, in many ways, but at least he has the radio. He knows there’s a world outside of the remains of Beacon Hills, if only because Deucalion is doing his best to burn it to the ground. He looks at Chris again. “Deucalion wants the Nemeton too. Full disclosure.”

Chris sighs again, and shakes his head. “We are so fucked right now, Peter.”

Peter remembers him saying something similar years ago, when they’d woken up together tangled in sheets that smelled of sweat and cum, both of them knowing they wouldn’t take a minute of it back. Always on opposite sides of some ridiculous war.

Always.

“What now?” Stiles asks. “What do we do now?”

Chris smiles down at him. “I go back.”

“Back?” Stiles jolts, and Peter feels the way his heart skips a beat as fear grips him. “But he’ll figure it out! He’ll know you helped me!”

“Maybe,” Chris says.

 _Absolutely_ , Peter thinks. Gerard Argent is no fool.

Chris slowly unpeels Stiles’s fingers from his shirt. “I’m no good to anyone out here, Stiles. If there’s any hope of stopping this, I need to be close.” He seems to lose himself in thought for a moment. “The chemicals are guarded. I can’t get near them, and I don’t think I’d want to anyway. Gerard’s not going to wait for Congressional approval, so maybe I have to find a way to ground the choppers. That might buy us some time.”

“Some time for what though?” Stiles asks. “It’s not going to change anything. Gerard’s not going to pack up and leave if the choppers don’t work suddenly, is he?”

He really is a clever boy.

No, it’s not going to change anything. Gerard is here, and Deucalion is coming, and there is absolutely nothing anybody can do to change a thing.

That’s when Peter hears it: boots on asphalt. The crunch of gravel and grit under thick soles. Ten people? Maybe twelve? Their footsteps are steady, synchronised. It can only be a patrol. And there are _no_ regular patrols that come on this route.

Peter’s blood runs cold. “Christopher, we have company.”

 

 

***

 

The windowless room in the hospital given over to the camp workers is cold, with no power. John helps divide up the blankets and claims a spot close to the door. Then, when it’s apparent that nobody is going to bother them until morning, he goes down the hallway toward the promised bathroom.

It’s a shower and toilet combo that used to be part of a private room, he guesses. Twelve workers sharing a single toilet and shower. But the water runs, and it’s hot, so John’s known worse. He washes his face and hands, and then paces the empty room attached to the bathroom. He finds himself drawn to the tiny window. He can’t see much. Just the back of the hospital, and the tanker.

There are spotlights set up around it, blazing away into the darkness, and armed guards surrounding it. John hates to think what must be inside. Some chemical that will kill werewolves, he supposes, and humans too if he and the others have been brought in to handle it.

“It’s a defoliant,” a voice from behind him says.

John spins around. The man looks familiar somehow, but John can’t think where he knows him from.

“Alan Deaton,” the man says, stepping forward and holding out his hand. “And you’re Sheriff Stilinski.”

John shakes his hand. “Jesus. You’re the vet.”

“I was,” Deaton tells him. “I was also an emissary.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“It means I acted as an envoy for the Hale pack, before the war.”

John frowns. “You knew about werewolves before the war?”

“Werewolves are as old as humans, Sheriff,” Deaton says. “There have always been people who knew about them, and not just hunters.”

“And now you work for Gerard Argent, huh?”

“Not by choice,” Deaton says, and something like regret passes over his features before he schools his expression again. “If Gerard gets to spray the Preserve with those chemicals, more than werewolves with die. People will too. Lots of people. More people than you can possibly imagine.”

“How many humans can there be in the Preserve?”

“The chemical isn’t the weapon, Sheriff. The weapon is in the Preserve, and Gerard means to uncover it.”

John snorts. “There aren’t any weapons in the Preserve. I’ve done plenty of search and rescues in those woods for lost hikers, and looked at more Department of Forestry maps than you can imagine. I’ve probably walked every fire trail in the place. There’s not a single missile silo or military instillation there. There’s nothing in the Preserve except trees.”

“Yes,” Deaton says. “And how crazy would you think I was if I said the weapon was a tree?”

John exhales slowly, and rubs his hand over his forehead. “I’ve probably heard crazier,” he admits at last.

Deaton smiles ruefully.

 

***

 

“We need to leave,” Peter says, scooping Stiles into his arms and rising to his feet. “ _Now_.”

Stiles struggles in his arms, his scent souring as his injuries flare up with pain again. He’s got at least a couple of broken ribs, Peter thinks. He can’t run, but Peter can carry him.

“No!” Stiles says. “No… Lydia! Take Lydia!”

Because Lydia, of course, can’t run either.

“Stiles,” Peter says, “Lydia hasn’t got a target painted on her. If they catch her, she’ll be fine. Probably.”

Stiles shoves away from him, finding his feet. “Probably isn’t good enough!”

It’s not, is it? Not for Stiles, who’s done everything he can for Lydia since this whole thing began.

Peter looks around. Lydia and Parrish are standing in the doorway. Lydia’s hands are splayed protectively over her baby, and Peter knows that Stiles will never forgive him if he doesn’t choose her in this moment.

“Chris,” Peter says. “You and Parrish take Stiles. Go north. We’ll meet at dawn at the high school.”

Chris nods. He’s pale, his face drawn. He knows there’s no going back to the hospital now. He knows he’s been made.

Peter strides over to Lydia and lifts her. “Run,” he says to them. “ _Run_.”

 

***

 

It hurts to move, even slung between Chris and Parrish, but Stiles keeps moving anyway. Peter and Lydia have already vanished into the darkness, and that’s good. That’s what Stiles is going to focus on.

“Parrish,” Chris says. “Go. Go back. They might not know you had anything to do with it.”

“Sir…”

“Go,” Chris tells him. “Find a way to contact my daughter, Allison. Tell her everything.”

“Good luck,” Parrish says, and then he’s gone too.

And then there are boots crunching on rubble, and bright flashlights blinding them, and little red dots dancing over Stiles’s chest. Gerard Argent strides forward, his face twisted with sick delight, like he takes some thrill in discovering his son has betrayed him.

“You tracked him?” Chris asks. “You knew I wouldn’t let you hurt him, so you put a tracker somewhere on him?”

Stiles gasps. Is it _his_ fault they’ve been caught?

“No, Christopher,” Gerard says, shaking his head slowly. “Don’t take me for a fool. I put a tracker on _you_.”

 

***

 

Derek’s watching the town when he hears the gunshots. It’s hard to gauge distance and direction at night, but they sound close. For a second he freezes, but then tests the pack bonds. Peter’s okay. Still here, still the alpha. He howls, just to be sure.

A few moments later, Peter answers.

Derek hears the fear in that howl, the plea for help. He starts running, the betas at his heels.


	23. Chapter 23

Gerard bought him his first gun. Taught him how to shoot it. Taught him how to move, how to react, how to _hunt_. Taught him about the monsters in the dark, and the ways to kill them.

Gerard gave him his first gun.

Peter… Peter gave him a fucking rabbit. Slipped it into the pocket of his jacket and then danced away, laughing.

“Don’t die,” Stiles says, eyes wide, hands pressing against the wound in his gut. “Don’t die.”

Of course Gerard shot him in the gut. He wants it to hurt for a long time before it kills him.

Stiles is frantic as they try and wrench him away.

“Don’t die,” he says again, and Chris has no idea how he earned those words from this boy. How a series of cold transactions between them—bloodless, he’d thought of them once— came to _this_.

He has no regrets either.

 

***

 

Peter delivers Lydia into Jackson’s arms. “Take her back to the school. _Now_.”

He needs to go back for Chris and Stiles, but before he can turn Derek is grasping his wrist roughly enough for his claws to tear into Peter’s skin.

“Peter.” Derek’s eyes flash.

Peter growls. “Are you challenging me, nephew?”

“Challenging you not to get yourself fucking _killed_ ,” Derek growls right back.

He has a point. Leading the pack straight into a bunch of soldiers armed with wolfsbane bullets? Not Peter’s greatest military strategy. It’d be right up there with the charge of the Light Brigade, probably.

Peter forces his eyes back to blue. “You have a point,” he says, even though the echo of the gunshots still reverberates in his bones, in the twisted endings of his nerves.

They advance slowly, silently, the betas falling into line behind them.

Cora shoots him a worried glance, and for a moment Peter is tempted to tell her to go with Jackson, but that’s not fair. Not to the others. They’re pack. They’re in this together.

Peter swallows down the urge to howl when he smells the sharp copper scent of blood cutting through the night air. Blood and hot shell casings and the lingering stench of pain.

 _Chris_.

 

***

 

Parrish manages to sneak back into HQ because the place is in an uproar. At the checkpoint, Major Argent’s men are arguing with General Argent’s men, and none of the officers have showed up yet to tell them to calm the fuck down.

“You know what this is?” Hooper is demanding as Parrish heads past hoping they’ll think he was just in the ambulance bay getting off with some stray. “This is my post, and you got no authority here until my LT tells me to leave!”

Parrish gets inside and takes the stairs two at a time. He hurries to the major’s room, grabs his laptop, and retreats with it to a disused storeroom on the floor below. He’s not going to get caught there twice, thanks very much. He powers up the laptop, thanks fuck it isn’t password protected, and opens the major’s email. He scrolls through his contacts quickly, until he finds Ally. That has to be Allison, right? The daughter. He’s about to send an email when the little green icon flashes beside her name, telling him she’s online right now. Parrish opens up a video chat window.

“Dad?” Her face falls as soon as she sees it’s not him. It’s some stranger, sitting in the dark. “Who are you?”

“My name is Jordan Parrish,” he says. “Major Argent asked me to contact you. The general’s going ahead with his plan. The tanker arrived earlier, and the workers to load the choppers.” He pauses, the laptop jiggling as his legs shake from the run up the stairs. Or from the close call with the general. “I guess you know what to do with that?”

“I have no idea who you are,” she says instead. “Or what the hell you’re talking about.”

Plausible deniability, okay. Because how does she know he’s not setting her up here, getting her to admit her father’s been talking out of turn? She has no reason to trust him.

“That’s fine,” he says. “I passed on the message. You do with it what you want.”

“Where’s my dad?”

“I don’t know,” Parrish says. “Outside somewhere, I think. The general knows. He knows the major’s against him. I got away. I think the major did too, but I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. The whole fucking place is in an uproar.”

Allison Argent doesn’t say anything. Just reaches out and ends the chat.

Parrish sits in the storeroom in the darkness, and wonders if he even made a difference.

 

***

 

The courtyard garden is dead. Stiles remembers coming here with his mom when she was well enough to get out of bed. There used to be shrubs and flowers and even a fountain. It was a place full of life and, even if Stiles had been too little to realize it at the time, a place to reflect on death. Most of the terminal patients used to come down here, to look at the flowers and to soak up the sunlight while they could.

It’s all dead now. The earth is bare, and cold. Even the grass has gone. The cracked remains of the sprinkler hoses are the only things poking through the dirt.

There’s an old park bench sitting in the middle of the garden. They make Chris walk to it, even though his uniform is soaked in blood and Stiles doesn’t know how he can stand, let alone put one foot in front of the other.

Stiles feels an ache inside his gut, for all the plants that have died here, their roots shrivelled and brittle and laying under the dirt like dry bones. He can feel their ghosts whispering to him, humming under his feet.

He sits down next to Chris.

“Don’t be scared,” Chris murmurs to him.

“I’m not,” Stiles says. It’s not a lie. Maybe he’s in shock, but nothing feels real enough to be a threat. Nothing feels real at all. He feels like a child watching a magic show, except he can see every move the magician makes. There aren’t any mirrors here.

There are men in uniforms milling about.

“Christopher,” Gerard says. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“You’re committing a war crime,” Chris says, his voice firm even though his breathing is labored. “You’re violating the Chemical Weapons Convention which is why Congress won’t ever sign off on this.” He looks at the soldiers gathered around. “And you’re making each one of these men an accomplice.”

“You’re a traitor, Christopher,” Gerard says, his eyes glittering.

Chris lifts his chin. “Then arrest me and put me on trial.”

“Oh, we’re _way_ past that.” Gerard shakes his head. “I’m glad your sister’s not alive to see you now. She died for the cause, and look at you.” He spits on the ground close to Chris’s boots. “Look at you.”

There’s a moment, Stiles thinks, when it almost seems like the soldiers won’t comply, won’t line up, won’t go along with this. It’s an illusion though, probably. Isn’t it always easier than to be the one man standing against the inexorable tide? This might be wrong, and they might know it, but this isn’t about some courtroom ten or twenty years from now, some distant reckoning that might not ever happen. This is about now, and there are only two options: with Gerard, or against him. And against him is a death sentence.

Stiles remembers watching movies about wars when he was a kid. He’d thought that wars made heroes, but that isn’t true, is it? Wars only make cowards.

He watches as the men line up.

Watches as they point their guns toward him and Chris.

“Don’t be scared,” Chris says, and curls his bloody fingers through Stiles’s.

Stiles closes his eyes.

 

***

 

“What’s going on?” Parrish asks, pushing against the crowd of uniforms streaming toward the back of the hospital.

“Major Argent’s in front of a firing squad!” someone tells him, breathless. “Right now!”

Parrish is carried along with the crowd.

 

***

 

There’s some commotion going on outside, and John and a few of the other workers leave their rooms and head for the windows. It’s Brian who finds a window that overlooks the old garden, and calls for the others to come and see.

“Holy shit,” John says, because Major Argent and some skinny kid are sitting on a bench, a firing squad standing in front of them, while Gerard Argent struts around proudly.

“Is that legal?” Brian asks, and it’s such a ludicrous question that John almost wants to laugh. He probably would, if he wasn’t about to see two people get shot right below him.

“What the hell does legal matter to them?” one of the women mutters.

There are lights in the courtyard, but the sky above is fading slowly to gray as the dawn creeps in. John wonders if that’s coincidence, or if Gerard likes the sense of history. People were always shot at dawn, right?

John’s about to turn away when the boy next to the major leans forward, and the light catches his face. For a second John sees a flash of Claudia sitting there, all those years ago, a rug over her knees. He blinks to clear his vision, his stomach tensing and bile rising in his throat.

The boy…

It can’t be, and yet every atom inside John is screaming that he knows that boy. He knows that face, that upturned nose, those moles.

It _can’t_ be, but it is.

It’s _Stiles_.

It’s Stiles, and there are men pointing guns at him.

John heads for the stairs at a run.

 

***

 

Time is an arbitrary construct. The roots in the earth don’t need it, don’t fight it. Time is meaningless, and yet there’s not enough of it. Never enough of it.

“Stiles!” someone screams, and Stiles’s eyes flash open.

There’s a man in orange coveralls running toward him, pushing through the gathering onlookers.

“Dad?” he asks. “ _Dad_?”

And in that moment, Gerard orders his men to take aim.

No.

No, Stiles’s isn’t going to die today.

“No,” he says. He can hear the roots under the ground now, and they’re not dead at all. He can hear the sound they make, as deafening as the roar of the ocean. It’s so loud that Stiles doesn’t know how people can talk without yelling all the time. How they can sleep. It’s incredible. Why hasn’t he noticed it before now?

Stiles flings up his free hand, and suddenly the world is green. Luminescent, like fireflies, like the leaves of the plants that grow in the darkest places and make their own light. Eldritch light.

“No,” he says, rising to his feet. He can feel the earth thrumming underneath him. He can feel the Nemeton. It’s so close, and it’s whispering to him to come. The Nemeton will protect him. It will protect them all.

Someone fires—maybe they all do—but the bullets can’t pierce the light.

“Dad,” Stiles says, and holds out his hand.

His dad can though, because the light belongs to Stiles. The Nemeton made it just for him, because it’s awake again now, and it’s calling to him.

“Dad,” he says again, and laughs and cries at the same time when John pulls him into a tight embrace. At their feet, green shoots break through the cold earth.

“What the hell is going on, kiddo?” John asks, voice rough with tears.

“I think,” Stiles says, dizzy, breathless, “Dad, I think I’m _something_.”

 

***

 

Peter howls when he sees the glow of green light from the hospital. Howls, and he’s four years old again, and he’s found something _magic_.

The Nemeton.

The Nemeton is awake.


	24. Chapter 24

It’s chaos in the courtyard, or it will be in a minute. Nobody knows what the fuck to do, and their first instinct, Parrish thinks, is to start shooting. The bullets that have hit the green light surrounding Stiles and John and Major Argent are lying useless on the ground, but how long until Gerard’s men and Major Argent’s turn on one another?

“Lay your weapons down,” a man says, his voice rising above the noise, and Parrish turns around. “Lay your weapons down, and nobody will get hurt.”

Parrish doesn’t know who this guy is, and he doesn’t know if he should believe him or not.

A bullet rattles against the tread of his boot. Parrish looks down, and sees a piece of grass unfurling from the cold, cracked earth, wrapping itself around the bullet as though it’s trying to consume it. He shifts his foot away quickly, heart pounding.

“Deaton!” Gerard growls. “What the hell is going on?”

Deaton approaches the general, and he looks so serene, so fearless, that Parrish is sure he’s going to die. “The Nemeton has awoken,” Deaton says, and he smiles.

Parrish doesn’t know the guy, but he knows which side he’s on here. When Gerard makes a move for his sidearm, Parrish is quicker. He has the barrel of his own Glock pressed into the side of Gerard’s skull before anyone else can move.

And fuck.

Some of that magic green bulletproof light would be nice right now.

“Thank you,” Deaton says mildly, nodding at Parrish. “But that’s not necessary. Put your gun away, soldier.”

Parrish lowers his sidearm warily.

“What the hell did you do, druid?” Gerard growls, and reaches out to grab Deaton by the collar of his shirt.

“I did what I’ve always sworn to do,” Deaton replies, that serene half-smile still tugging at his mouth. “I’ve restored balance, you psychotic old fuck.”

Serene was maybe not the right word.

Gerard reaches for his own gun, and Parrish is ready to shove the guy—the druid—out of the way, when suddenly Gerard stops and jerks like a marionette on a string. His face goes red. “What the—”

Deaton raises his palms to the soldiers surrounding them. “Put your guns down. On the ground. All of you, please.”

Parrish feels a sudden stab of pain underfoot, and winces. When he lifts his boot, a tendril of a root waves around searching for it, to pierce the sole again.

“Fuck,” he exclaims.

“Guns down!” Deaton calls again. “Please!”

Parrish divests himself of his Glock, dropping it onto the ground. His skin crawls as the tendril reaches out for it, a twisting little tentacle. The root curls around the grip, tightens, and then the ground cracks and a flurry of roots and grass and weeds burst out to claim the gun.

“Drop your weapons!” he yells. “They’re only going for the weapons!”

He turns back in horror when he hears Gerard’s howl of pain. The old man’s hand is clutching his gun tightly. A thick vine has wrapped around it, wrapped around his hand and wrist. Parrish’s gaze drops to Gerard’s boots just in time to see a twist of roots burst forth through them, covered in blood. One of the roots climbs his left leg. The other—Parrish’s gut turns—digs into his ankle. Parrish hears bone crack.

“Drop your weapons!” he yells. “Drop them!”

Some of them don’t.

Some of them flee.

Some are caught like Gerard, roots digging through their feets and into their twisting, screaming bodies.

Parrish is shaking as he watches. Waiting to feel the stab of roots through his boots again, and into his flesh. Thinks about running, because this is the most horrifying thing he’s ever seen, but he doesn’t. Because he looks away from Gerard, away from the others, and sees roots crack through the tiles on the pathway surrounding the courtyard, and understands in this moment that whatever this is, it can’t be run from.

This is a reckoning.

 

***

 

There are no guards on the checkpoint when Peter and the pack reach the hospital. It’s been abandoned. Derek growls when Peter tries to head inside first, and shoves his uncle behind him. They head inside.

Peter can hear screaming from somewhere nearby, and the sound of running feet in the stairwells, and on the floors above them. They pass an old nurses’ station, and Peter turns his head as the wall cracks and a twisting vine appears out of the gap and reaches upward toward the ceiling.

The Nemeton is most certainly awake again.

Derek leads the way through the hospital toward the screaming, and Peter thinks that at any moment they’ll walk straight into a wall of wolfsbane bullets. But the only soldiers they see are unarmed, eyes wide with terror, pressing themselves back against walls or diving into rooms as the pack passes by.

Nobody even tries to shoot.

It’s not until they reach the light-filled courtyard that Peter sees the ground splitting open and the roots and grass and weeds spilling forth, feeling their way blindly like tentacles, pulling weapons with them back into the earth.

 

***

 

Wolves.

The wolves are here.

Parrish stumbles toward them, and a boy with the crooked jaw grabs his arm to steady him before he falls.

“Peter,” he manages, his body numb with shock. “Stiles is…”

Peter’s eyes widen as he turns to look at Stiles, still encased in green light.

“Stiles is a _spark_ ,” he finishes on Parrish’s behalf, like somehow this all makes sense now.

 

***

 

Logic tells John that he should he terrified right now. Terrified of what’s going on, and how his son is somehow at the crux of it. But fuck logic. This is his boy, this is _Stiles_ , and John has been mourning his loss for almost a decade. There isn’t a power on earth, or in it, either, that could prevent John from putting his arms around his son and holding him.

They’re both crying.

“I thought you were dead,” John tells him, pulling back enough to look at Stiles’s face, to check again that this is really happening. He’s deaf to the screams of pain and terror behind him. “I thought you were _dead_.”

Stiles hugs him close again, burying his face in his neck. “ _Dad_.”

“I’ve got you,” John tells him. “I’ve got you, kiddo.”

Slowly, the green light surrounding them begins to fade.

 

***

 

“ _Hale_.” Gerard’s voice comes out in a wheeze.

Peter wants to smile, to take some joy in the fact that this man is literally being slowly ripped apart in front of him, but… well, maybe he’ll save that for later.

“You wanted the Nemeton, Gerard,” he says instead. “You got it.”

Peter’s grandmother always used to tell him to be careful what he wished for. Someone should have told Gerard the same thing.

Gerard’s eyes roll in his red, straining face. He opens his mouth, but it isn’t words that spill out. It’s a cluster of tendrils that uncurl like the fronds of ferns, spraying blood. Peter watches until he hears Gerard’s heart give out. The man is still standing, still moving, but he’s nothing but dead flesh now, supported only by the roots and vines that killed him.

He’ll make decent fertilizer, Peter supposes.

Around him, Peter can feel the panic of the human soldiers, as sharp and tangy as copper against his tongue. He can feel the pack’s panic as well, like a discordant note played over the bond that links them all.

“You’re fine,” he tells them, and raises his voice so the humans hear it as well. Yes, he’ll feel dirty for that in the morning. “Stay calm. You’re fine.”

He doesn’t care enough to wait and make sure they believe it. He leaves that to Derek, who has always been a better second than Peter deserves. Instead, he steps toward the park bench in the middle of the courtyard and kneels down in front of the man sitting there.

“Christopher?”

Chris’s gaze is unfocussed. “P-Peter?”

Peter curls his fingers around Chris’s. Chris’s hands are very cold. “I’m here.” He can’t think of anything else to say. “I’m here.”

Stiles kneels beside him, and takes Chris’s other hand. “Don’t die.”

“I’m tryin’,” Chris mumbles.

“Try harder, asshole,” Stiles tells him.

Chris surprises them both with a smile.

 

***

 

When the medical team arrives, Stiles falls back onto his ass and lets them take Chris away. Peter goes with them, eyes flashing red, and then Stiles turns around and _sees_. There are dead men twisted into strange shapes like badly constructed scarecrows, roots and twigs sticking out of their mouths, their eyes, poking through their bloody skin like the quills of porcupines.

Stiles scrambles to his feet. “Did I—”

_Did I do that?_

Sickness rises in his throat, and his hands start to shake.

The man who gave him the weird little plant—the vet—is suddenly standing in front of him. “You woke the Nemeton, Stiles.”

“I didn’t. I couldn’t have.”

“You’re a very powerful spark,” the vet tells him. “Don’t be afraid of that. You woke the Nemeton today and it protected you against those who wished you, and this town, harm. You’re its keeper now, Stiles. Not Gerard, or Deucalion, or the hundred other men who would only wish to use it for their own power.”

Stiles starts to shake with the cold, with delayed shock.

The vet reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder. “It chose well, I think.”

Stiles doesn’t understand all of this, but that’s okay. He’s alive, and his dad is here, and _Scott_ is here, and not understanding is a small price to pay for that, right?

“Dad?” he asks, his voice thin, and suddenly his dad’s arms are around him again, and he’s _missed_ this. He never thought he’d have this again, and the sudden weight of the last eight years of grief collapses over him again, and he’s crying, but that’s okay because his dad is crying too. And so is Scott, who’s wormed his way into this hug, and he’s allowed because he’s Stiles’s best friend, and if there’s one person who deserves to share Stiles’s dad with him it’s Scott.

“Oh, Stiles,” John says, voice muffled somewhere in the press of their bodies. “Scott. My boys.”

No. Stiles doesn’t have to understand anything yet.

 

***

 

By the time Parish thinks to check the oncology ward, Gerard’s team has vanished. He makes it to the roof just in time to see the last of the choppers vanish into the dawn. He walks to the edge of the roof and looks down at the tanker. Some of the soldiers have gone. Some of them are still standing there, skewered by roots and tendrils.

The tanker is covered in vines.

  


	25. Chapter 25

Chris blinks himself awake after surgery and stares at the walls for a while, waiting for them to resolve themselves into dull hospital beige. Instead, they stay a bright, verdant green. It takes him longer than it should to realize that there are vines clinging to the walls of the room.

He drifts off again.

When he wakes for a second time it’s to a dull throbbing pain in his gut that promises to sharpen into something excruciating if he even tries to move.

A warm hand smooths over his shoulder, and slides gently down toward his stomach.

It takes Chris a little while to focus.

“Showing your belly to the beast, huh?” Peter asks.

Chris watches his pain spiral in black tendrils up Peter’s forearm. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Peter smirks. “It wouldn’t, would it?”

“Peter, why are there leaves on the walls?”

Peter shrugs. “Magic tree stump.”

Good enough, Chris figures. He’ll take it.

 

***

 

It’s not chaos exactly, but it’s a near thing.

Between them, John and Parrish and Deaton take control of the hospital. Many of the soldiers have fled, in a procession of speeding trucks, all the way out of Beacon Hills. And that, John knows, is going to be problematic when they return with reinforcements. Gerard Argent’s team has vanished on the dust, the choppers lifting off and disappearing into the dawn.

Some of the soldiers have stayed. Laid down their weapons and stayed, and John doesn’t have any idea why, except that whatever is happening here now is new, and maybe they’re tired enough of the old to give that a chance. To see where this goes. Or maybe they’re just too well trained to desert their posts. As long as they don’t pick up their weapons again—and John doesn’t think any of them are stupid enough to try that—he’ll worry about their motivations later.

Deaton collects all the weapons up. He seems unafraid to touch them, even as tendrils and creepers still climb the walls of the hospital.

“It’s all about intent,” he says to John. “The Nemeton knows me.”

John and Parrish exchange a glance.

“It’s all a little _Day of the Triffids_ for me,” Parrish admits a few hours later, almost stumbling as he takes the steps between floors too quickly.

John grabs him by the elbow to keep him from tripping. It’s been a long day already, and it’s sure as hell not over yet. “That movie was a bit before your time, wasn’t it?”

“Thanks,” Parrish tells him, reaching out to steady himself on the handrail. “It’s a classic though.”

John pats him on the shoulder.

“Are we okay here, John?” Parrish asks him.

“Son, there are dandelions growing out the walls. In winter.” John shows him a crooked smile. “I have no idea what the hell is going on right now.”

“Yeah,” Parrish says, giving a jerky nod.

He looks suddenly younger than his years. John remembers him from Bakersfield. Parrish was one of the good ones. Not jaded enough yet to have all his humanity knocked out of him. He’d treated the inmates like people, not like the enemy, and not like anything less than human.

“This is where I told Stiles you were alive,” Parrish says. His throat bobs as he swallows. “Right here in this stairwell. It scared the living fuck out of him. I probably made things worse than they had to be. I don’t know.”

John digs his fingers into Parrish’s shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t beat yourself up over things you can’t change, Jordan. There’s gonna be enough of that going around if we actually manage to survive the next few days.”

Parrish nods.

John quirks his mouth. “At some point, you know, I’m gonna want to know what my kid was doing here at HQ when he wasn’t a member of the military.”

Parrish looks away, which just about confirms it.

John pats Parrish on the back again. “Let’s worry about getting through the day before we worry about anything else, okay?”

Parrish nods again, and follows John down the stairs.

 

***

 

Peter has never been a fan of Deaton. Even back when Talia was alive and Deaton was the pack emissary, Peter had found the man’s cryptic facade insufferable. Fucking druids and their fucking bullshit, seriously. Peter is desperate to escape the hospital. He’s lived too long in the Preserve apparently, because the walls are closing in on him. It may have more to do with the fact that he can smell so many damn humans as to any latent claustrophobia though.

Unarmed doesn’t mean harmless.

Peter figures he would have ditched the hospital hours ago, if it weren’t for Chris and Stiles. But while Chris is sleeping and Stiles has scurried off to be with his father, Peter has been seconded into Deaton’s service, apparently.

“You are the alpha, Peter,” Deaton reminds him as they search the oncology ward, checking for anything incriminating Gerard’s team has left behind. Deaton is playing a long game. He wants evidence, as though the tanker full of deadly chemicals isn’t enough. Apparently Deaton wants evidence he can send to Washington. Peter would be in favour of sending the tanker, honestly. Fuck Washington and everyone in it. “You’re needed here. The people need to know that you’re not a monster. Like it or not, you’re the public face of the Hale pack.”

“Bullshit.” Peter tips over a drawer. “There is no _public_. There’s a handful of terrified soldiers, a bunch of traumatized workers from what amounts to a concentration camp, and however many strays there are still slinking around the rubble like cats. Those are hearts and minds not worth winning, Alan.”

“You,” Deaton says, and jabs a bright red pin in the map. “Alpha Peter Hale. Leader of the wolves.”

Peter sighs and folds his arms over his chest.

Deaton takes a green pin and presses it into the map. “Major Christopher Argent. In charge of the military.”

Peter shrugs.

Deaton reaches for a white pin. “And Sheriff Stilinski. In charge of the civilians.” He looks to Peter. “It’s all about balance, Peter.”

“Oh, a triumvirate,” Peter says. “How’d that work out for Caesar in the end?”

“Of course you’d see yourself as Caesar,” Deaton says, his tone mild.

Peter raises his brows. “Maybe before we divide Gaul into three parts, we should actually make sure we can keep it.”

“Oh, you can keep it, Peter,” Deaton says, tapping the colored pins with the tips of his fingers. “Simply because, with the Nemeton awake, there’s no way anyone could take it off you.”

Peter hopes that’s true.

 

***

 

When Chris wakes up the next time, there’s a boy sleeping in the chair beside his bed. His legs are drawn up, and he’s hugging them, and Chris’s spine twinges in sympathy just looking at him. His face is bruised, his lip split, and as Chris watches he shifts uncomfortably in the chair, grunting a little in his sleep, but the pain of moving isn’t enough to wake him. The shadows under his eyes are as dark as the bruises Gerard left on his pale skin.

Chris is torn between irritation that Stiles has chosen to sleep in a damn chair, and wonder that he’s even here at all.

He turns his head as Peter enters the room. Peter crosses to Chris first, and draws his pain. Then, moving quietly, he stands beside Stiles and curls his fingers around the back of his neck. Stiles sighs in his sleep.

“You want to tell me what’s going on out there?” Chris asks at last, his voice rasping a little in his dry throat.

“At this point I really have no idea,” Peter murmurs. “But we’re not dead yet, and that seems like a positive.”

Stiles jolts awake suddenly. “Lydia!”

“Shh,” Peter tells him. “I’ve sent Boyd to get her and Jackson. They’ll be here soon.”

Stiles stretches out, wincing a little. “Is it safe?”

“You tell us, little rabbit,” Peter says. “You’re the one controlling the Nemeton.”

“I don’t think I am,” Stiles says, his breath catching. He gazes at the vines on the wall, and shakes his head. “No, I’m not controlling it. But I can feel it. I’m not scared of it. It’s not evil. It’s just… it just _is_. It’s protecting us. Protecting the town.” He chews his bottom lip for a moment. “I think. I think that’s what’s happening. We look after it, and it looks after us.”

Chris closes his eyes briefly, and he’s in the courtyard again, too weak to move, watching as his father dies. He doesn’t feel a single stab of pity for the old man. There’s regret though. Regret that his father wasn’t a better man. Regret that he wasn’t either, and didn’t find a way to end this years before it started. Before the war, before the Hale fire, before Gerard twisted Kate so much that she manipulated Derek Hale—a _teenager_ —into spilling all his secrets to her.

The world might have been a very different place if Chris had only found the courage to stand up back then.

Because there’s one thing that Chris knows for sure. It’s easier to destroy the world than try to put it back together.

“I’m gonna need my laptop,” he says. “Someone needs to tell Congress that the Nemeton is not going to take kindly to any reinforcements they send.” He meets Peter’s gaze. “I guess it’s just us now.”

Peter inclines his head. “So it seems.”

Chris can work with that.

 

***

 

It’s late in the afternoon by the time Cora gets back to the hospital with the radio. Peter takes it up onto the roof of the hospital, and grins at the pack.

“Peter!” Deucalion growls. “I’m hearing reports that the humans have abandoned Beacon Hills. What the hell is going on there?”

“Well,” Peter drawls. “I have good news and I have bad news.”

Deucalion’s reply is half lost in static. The half that Peter gets is mostly expletives.

“The good news,” Peter says, “is that we’ve located the Nemeton at last, and it has apparently woken up. The bad news, Deuc, is that you’re not on its guest list.”

Deucalion growls again.

“You were right,” Peter says. “The Nemeton is incredibly powerful. The humans don’t have any weapons that can match it. Neither do you, unfortunately. But I do hope you take some consolation in the fact that you weren’t chasing a pipe dream this whole time. The Nemeton is exactly what you said it would be.”

“Peter!”

“Have a nice war, Deucalion,” Peter tells him. “Send me a postcard sometime. Let me know how it all works out for you.”

He cuts the transmission, and smirks at Cora.

“You’re such an asshole, Uncle Peter,” she tells him, brows raised.

Peter turns the radio off. “I do my very best, sweetheart.”


	26. Chapter 26

The bombs are dropped over the remains of Beacon Hill that night.

None of them land.

Somewhere between the planes and the ground they just… vanish.

The sky glows very green that night.

 

***

 

John has been without his son for eight long years and, now that he knows he’s alive, he can barely go a few minutes without needing to seek him out, to pull him into an embrace, to curl his hands around the back of his head, to just touch him, and know that he’s there. The first few times he does it, it’s tears all over again from both of them. After that, smiles and hints of the brightness that John remembers from his boy. _He’s a little enthusiastic,_ John told a neighbor once. _He’s a menace,_ she’d replied, no malice in her words as they watched Stiles fill every single one of the holes he’d dug in both their front yards. They’d settled in the end for handful. And no, Stiles never had found the pirate treasure he was digging for.

The last few times John has reached for Stiles though, he’s seen something new there. Something different. Stiles’s smile has felt a little forced, a little brittle, his hugs almost unwilling.

John finds him with Lydia, in the old children’s ward. The space is full of camp beds left over from the military. There are faded cartoon characters on the walls.

“Can we talk, kiddo?” John asks him, leaning in the doorway.

Lydia unpeels Stiles’s fingers from her belly, and squeezes them before she levers herself to her feet. “I was just going to stretch my legs anyway.”

She gives John a small smile as she passes him.

“No,” John says as Stiles makes to clamber off the bed. “Stay there.”

He sits down beside him. “Are you okay, son?”

Stiles stares at one of the cartoons on the wall. It’s a dog on a skateboard. He nods. “Why?”

“Because you can’t look at me,” John tells him.

Stiles does then, his eyes wide with guilt and horror. “Dad, I…”

“I’m sorry I left you,” John says, his throat aching and his eyes stinging. “I’m sorry I didn’t come back sooner. If I’d thought for a second you were still alive—”

“Dad!” Stiles reaches out and grabs his hand. “It’s not that. It’s not!”

“Okay,” John says, shoulders sagging with relief. “Then what is it?”

Stiles squeezes his eyes shut. “I, um…” He shudders. “You know why they called us strays, right? Because a stray dog will do anything for a meal.” He opens his eyes again, and tugs his hand back from John to wipe his cheeks. “Throw it a couple of scraps, and it’ll come real close.”

John nods, his throat aching.

Stiles looks away again. “We were so hungry, Dad. It was just me and Lydia, and with the baby coming… We didn’t have enough food for the winter, so I, um, I came here. Chris--Major Argent… We made a deal.” His voice cracks. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

The rage that wells up inside John isn’t directed at Stiles, but he knows the worst thing he can do right now is let it show. “Did he hurt you?”

Stiles shakes his head, sniffling.

“Kiddo, you did what you needed to do to stay alive. There’s no shame in that.” His voice is rough with unshed tears. “None at all.”

Stiles is suddenly wracked with sobs, and burrowing into John’s side. “You’re not mad at me?”

“No, son. God, no.” John holds him, and finds him rocking him a little, like he did when Stiles was a baby, grizzly because he couldn’t sleep. “I hate that you had to do something like that, that you didn’t have a choice, but I’m not mad at you. I could never be mad at you for surviving.”

Stiles’s shoulders shake. “There was this voice in my head, all the time. _What would Dad say if he could see you now?_ I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”

“Hey.” John holds him tighter, his own tears flowing. “You’re alive, kiddo. You’re _alive_. And there is nothing you could do that would ever make me love you less, okay? Nothing.”

The rest of it comes out over the course of the next few hours. Argent, and Peter too.

“There was this boy in the first camp I was in,” John says. “He was angry. Always so angry. He killed a guard, and I saw him do it. The next day, when they found the body, I told them the boy had done it. They dragged him out of the line up, and they shot him, right in front of us all. I still see that boy’s face when I close my eyes at night, Stiles. And I tell myself that if I hadn’t given him up, they would have shot us all. That’s what they said they’d do. And sometimes I don’t know if I ratted him out because I was trying to save everyone else in that camp, or if I was just trying to save myself.”

He looks up to find Lydia standing in the doorway. She slips back into the room quietly, and sits down on the other side of Stiles.

“Nobody ever wins a war, Stiles. Everybody loses something.”

 

***

 

Chris wakes up in the middle of the night to find John Stilinski standing over him.

“Touch my son again, and I don’t care if I can’t pick up a gun. I will find some way to kill you. You can pass that along to Hale as well.”

 

***

 

In the days after Gerard’s death, Peter gives Stiles his space. Of course he’s earned it, and with his father back in the picture of course he wants to reconnect with the man. And Peter is busy. He has territory to patrol. He runs his betas ragged doing just that. On the third day he finds the body of Ennis, one of Deucalion’s wolves, skewered by a branch a few miles out of town.

“Looks like someone tried to cross the border,” he says, trying not to gag at the smell.

A few miles out of town in the other direction, a military checkpoint has been set up. It’s buzzing with activity, but clearly the soldiers have learned the same lesson as Ennis, and none of them attempt to get any closer. Men and women with all sorts of interesting scientific equipment appear to be taking readings and making furious notes, but the Nemeton is ancient and intractable. It will hold. Peter has no doubt at all as to its power. He’s known it since the moment he stumbled across it when he was a child.

He wonders if Stiles could find the actual stump, the source, and discovers that he has no doubt about that either.

It’s Boyd who truly tests the Nemeton. They do it back by Ennis’s body. Boyd crosses out of the Nemeton’s territory and then, closing his eyes, walks back again.

The trees around him shiver and shake, but nothing else happens.

Intent, Deaton keeps telling them. The Nemeton reads their intent. Stiles might claim he has no control of the thing, but Peter doesn’t truly believe that. There’s no way that the Nemeton’s fierce protectiveness isn’t mirrored in Stiles. There’s no way it doesn’t take its cue from the spark. But that’s something for Stiles and Deaton to work on later.

Now that there is going to be a later.

For the first time in years, Peter is able to think of the future as something that actually exists. It’s a strangely foreign concept, and Peter’s not the only one grappling with it.

They all are, he thinks. The wolves, the soldiers, and the strays.

On the morning of the fourth day, Chris finally climbs out of bed. Against his doctor’s orders, naturally, but Peter helps him down the stairs and draws his pain for him.

In the parking lot, everyone is assembled. Everyone except for Stiles, Peter sees, and growls a little at that. Chris has twenty-two military personal left, and Peter has his pack, and John Stilinski has the workers from the camp. Three little tribes coming together, just like Deaton said they would.

Apart from the fact that John Stilinski wants to kill both of them, of course. He’ll work with them, Peter knows, because they have no other choice. But he’ll quietly hate them while he does it. War makes strange alliances. Peace, even more so.

The strays, Peter knows, are listening from close by. They’re close enough that he can hear their hearts beating. At least eight of them, in different positions around the place. And those eight, Peter knows, will get word to the others.

Someone has managed to rig up a microphone.

Chris’s voice carries when he begins to speak.

“The world outside may be at war,” Chris says, “but we are not. We are no longer a part of that world. If anyone chooses to leave, they’re free to go. But for those who stay, we have a chance to rebuild Beacon Hills. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick, but it is possible. Congress can call us traitors all they want, but sooner or later they will have to deal with us. They can’t outgun us, they can’t invade us. That little light show the other night was the best they’ve got, and not a single bomb hit the ground. They _will_ deal with us.”

John steps forward and takes the microphone. “There’s nothing the war can throw at us that can touch us. What we have to do in the meantime is work together. We need to put our old divisions aside. It doesn’t matter if you’re military, or civilian, or werewolf. We have an opportunity here to rebuild this town, to rebuild a future, and if that’s not what you’re here for, then you know the way out.”

Peter takes the microphone. He’s always been good at speaking off the cuff, as long as he was allowed to be snarky and sarcastic. Heartfelt pleas about cooperation and peace? Not in Peter’s wheelhouse. He was never supposed to be the alpha, and he feels that acutely now. “Pack and territory. Those are the two things that matter most to a werewolf. They’re instinctual. Written on our bones. We will fight to the death to defend either of them. Beacons Hill is my territory, and anyone standing here today who wants rebuild it with me becomes a part of my pack.”

He flashes his eyes alpha red, and waits for the humans to run screaming.

Nobody does.

These are strange days indeed.

 

***

 

It’s Erica who finds the ration packs. An entire storeroom of them, packed floor to ceiling. She and Isaac take turns carrying some out into the parking lot and stacking them there.

Sooner or later the strays will come and take them.

 


	27. Chapter 27

Parrish walks around the tanker, squinting up at the vines lashed tight over it. He holds up a hand to shield his eyes as the sun tries to blind him.

“We sure about this?” he asks.

John grunts, and Deaton snaps a few more pictures of the tanker.

Parrish feels a little sick walking this close to the tanker. It’s not the chemicals, either. It’s the fact that the bodies of the soldiers who didn’t drop their weapons are still here. Still standing. And starting to stink pretty bad.

“What the hell else are we gonna do with it?” John says at last, hands on his hips as he surveys the tanker.

Parrish nods worriedly, and wipes his sweaty palms on his uniform pants.

Major Argent and Peter Hale make their way outside at last. Argent is still moving slowly, and Parrish isn’t the only one who’s noticed how closely Peter sticks to him, to offer an arm for support when he needs it, or to drain the major’s pain. The first time Parrish had seen that—Jackson with his hands on Lydia’s belly, black lines crawling up his veins as she grimaced through a bout of Braxton Hicks—he’d been amazed. He knows now that Peter’s brief, solicitous touches are actually a lot more than that. He suspects Argent doesn’t want people to know how much pain he’s still in.

Parrish can’t help wondering if Stiles knows it’s a ruse.

Stiles is standing close by, his shoulders hunched over a little, his hands shoved into the pockets of his hoodie. His gaze tracks Argent and Peter as they inspect the tanker. His eyes are wide and wary at the same time. Like a stray, Parrish thinks, eyeing off a ration pack.

“Stiles?” Deaton calls.

Stiles startles, flushing, and shuffles forward toward the tanker.

“Are you ready to try this?” Deaton asks.

Stiles wrinkles his nose and nods. “Nothing to lose, right?”

“That’s a tanker full of deadly chemicals,” Deaton reminds him.

“Right.” Stiles shrugs and rolls his shoulders. “No pressure.”

Parrish watches as Stiles steps closer to the tanker. Stiles raises his hand and puts it against one of the thick roots climbing over the truck. Parrish doesn’t know what he’s expecting exactly. An incantation or some sort? Something in an ancient language he has no hope of understanding? Instead Stiles chews his bottom lip for a moment, and then draws a deep breath.

“Thank you,” he says at last. “You can let go now.”

The mass of tendrils encasing the tanker seems to shudder as one, and then Stiles steps back and the roots and vines begin to retract, untangling themselves and sliding off the tanker, and slipping back into the cracks in the asphalt.

The dead soldiers collapse slowly, like tires with the air let out.

In the sudden silence, Parrish digs into his pocket for the keys he found in the old oncology ward.

“Okay,” he says, heart thumping with relief. “Let’s drive this out of here.”

 

***

 

At lunch, Stiles sits with the Hale pack and looks around the cafeteria before he digs into his ration pack. There are new faces here today. He recognizes one or two of them from encounters in the streets over the past few years. They’re strays. Stiles thinks of the bunch that attacked him that time, and hopes they aren’t here. Maybe they ran. Maybe they died months ago. Stiles had listened to the speeches that his dad and Argent and Peter gave, and he wants to believe they’re all on the same side now, but those guys? He’s still scared of those guys.

His dad is sitting with the new strays, talking to them and probably explaining how things are going to work now. One of the military doctors is there too, asking questions and filling out forms.

Everybody gets food. Everybody gets medical attention. Everybody gets equal treatment.

“At some point we’re going to run out of ration packs,” Isaac says in a low voice.

“And that point is in twelve and a half weeks, give or take,” Erica tells him.

“Give or take what?” Derek asks.

“It all depends on how many strays turn up.” Erica jabs her fork into something that’s supposed to be curried chicken. “The point is, we need to supplement our food supply, and we need to start doing it now.”

“We can hunt,” Boyd says.

Derek shakes his head. “We have to be careful doing that. The pack has gone from eight of us, to hundreds of people overnight. Are there really enough rabbits in the Preserve to sustain that?”

Scott sits down beside Stiles, his tray scraping on the table. “Then we need to catch as many breeding pairs as we can.”

“I know some of the strays have chickens,” Stiles says. “The group over from Cassidy Street. If they’re here. We traded them for eggs once, remember?”

“Yeah!” Scott nods eagerly. “Okay, so we do the same with chickens. We breed as many as we can, as quickly as we can.”

“And what do we feed them while we’re breeding them, smartass?” Erica asked.

“We start them off in the Preserve,” Scott says. “We let them forage. I mean, we’re the only predators, right? And we’re not going to eat them.”

“Forage?” Isaac asks.” In winter?”

Stiles waves his hands at the leafy vines clinging to the wall. “I don’t think we need to worry about a lack of plant life right now, do you?”

“Point,” Isaac admits.

“We should totally try and find some cows and goats,” Erica says, eyes gleaming like she’s already planning a raiding party somewhere outside of town. She probably is.

“These are all good ideas,” Derek says. “The important thing is we need to start now, and we need to diversify as much as we can. We’re going to have a rough few months coming up if we can’t get a handle on this immediately. Who’s in charge of the food supply?”

“Dude,” Stiles says, munching on a cracker. “I think maybe you just volunteered yourself.”

 

***

 

“Shouldn’t there be like a radio in here somewhere?” Cora asks as the tanker rumbles slowly out of Beacon Hills.

Parrish glances over at her. “There is a radio.”

“No, I mean one that plays music.” She rolls her eyes at him.

“This is a military vehicle,” Parrish reminds her.

“So if I want road trip music I’ll need to sing?” She grins at him, and suddenly bursts into the chorus of _I Kissed a Girl_.

Parrish stares at her for a moment, and then starts to laugh. He can’t remember the last time he laughed and, okay, there is still a lot of room for error here today, and everything could turn to shit in a heartbeat, but when it comes down to it, there are worse things than driving off to possible doom with a werewolf singing out-of-date pop music beside him.

 

***

 

After lunch Stiles goes looking for Lydia. He finds her lying on her cot with Jackson curled around her. She’s asleep. Stiles leans in the doorway for a moment, eyes stinging suddenly, and then straightens up to leave.

Jackson rolls his eyes and shifts over to make a little room. “Get over here, Stilinksi. No wriggling.”

“No wriggling,” Stiles agrees as he squeezes onto the cot.

This is good. This is nice. This is all he needs, right?

 

***

 

Something in the air shivers as they pass out of the range of the Nemeton’s protection, and Cora stops singing. Parrish draws a deep breath. A few hundred feet ahead, he can see the checkpoint. He brakes slowly.

“You okay?” he asks Cora when they finally roll to a stop, the hydraulic brakes hissing.

“Yeah.” She nods sharply. “Let’s do this.”

Parrish opens the door and steps to the ground.

Military yes, but also journalists. At least twenty of them, all wearing their bulletproof vests with PRESS emblazoned on the front. They have their cameras at the ready.

Cora falls into step beside Parrish as they walk toward the checkpoint.

“We’re returning the tanker that Gerard Argent sent to Beacon Hills.” Parrish speaks more to the journalists than the military. They’re the real power here. “I know Alan Deaton has sent all of you any information he could find on whatever the hell is in that thing, so I’d suggest treating it very carefully.”

He wishes he’d pulled his piece of paper with the bullet points on it out of his pocket before he got out of the tanker—something tells him to keep his hands clearly in sight—but he figures he can remember most of it.

“Beacon Hills has declared itself neutral territory,” he says, “by unanimous vote of all its residents, both human and werewolf. We were the first casualty of the war, and we’re going to be the first to rebuild. We no longer recognise the authority of the government of the United States, but we are willing to deal with you.”

Shutters whirr and click.

Cora lifts her chin. “You know you can’t hurt us. You’ve tried that. You know we are protected by a greater force than anything you have. Your missiles and bombs are useless. When you’re ready to put them aside, we’re ready to talk.”

“What sort of weapon is the Nemeton?” one of the journalists asks. “Are you planning on using it against the rest of the nation?”

“The Nemeton protects us,” Parrish says. “It’s not a weapon. But it’s more powerful than anything you can imagine.”

“Who’s in charge over there?” one of the others calls out. “Who’s your leader? It is Major Argent?”

“We’re being run by committee,” Parrish says, and can’t help smiling slightly. “We’ll let you know how it works out.”

“Is it safe for anyone to cross the boundary?” a woman asks. “Anyone not holding a weapon?”

 _Intent_ , Parrish thinks. It’s not the holding a weapon that counts, it’s the intent to use it.

“If you come to Beacon Hills with the intention to respect us, and not to harm us, then the Nemeton will allow you to pass,” he says. He looks away from the journalists, to the cluster of stony-faced officers. “And we will be seeking reparations. We want supplies, and tools. And we want our people back.”

He gives them a moment to digest that.

“Thank you,” he says. “We’re going back now.”

They turn and walk away from the checkpoint, from the tanker.

“Your heart’s racing,” Cora mumurs.

“Probably because I think they’re gonna shoot us in the back.”

Cora exhales shakily. “How bad would it look if we broke into a run right now?”

“Pretty bad,” Parrish says.

Cora reaches out and takes his hand and squeezes it tightly. “I’ll stop you from running if you stop me from running.”

“Deal,” Parrish says, and they make their way slowly toward the invisible protection of the Nemeton.

It’s the photograph of them walking back toward Beacon Hills, hand in hand, that makes the cover of every newspaper in the country.


	28. Chapter 28

Hours lengthen into days. Chris is so damn busy with work that he hardly notices the passage of the days. He eats when he’s hungry, sleeps when he’s tired, and notices Peter’s fingers curling around his wrist when he moves wrong and the pain flares. He sees Stiles around, usually with John or with Deaton and, once, squinting in the sunlight as he and Boyd chased down a runaway chicken. Chris is aware of his absences though. He doesn’t feel Stiles’s absence acutely at night, and he thinks that’s because the night never gave him Stiles. It’s in the quieter moments in the day that Chris misses him. When he looks up from his laptop and over toward his bed, and there’s no boy dozing there, dark lashes resting on his cheeks. It’s when he’s tired and slumped in the chair by the window, and he wants a challenging stare locked on him, fingers digging into his shoulders. It’s when he twists on the shower in his bathroom and he’s the only one there.

Peter watches Chris closely, sometimes with a thoughtful expression on his face, and sometimes with a sly smirk. Chris does his best to ignore it. He knows Peter’s waiting for him to crack, to admit that he misses Stiles.

Peter thinks he’s been intimidated by John Stilinski.

He hasn’t.

He’s been shamed.

 

***

 

“So,” Stiles says, linking his fingers through Lydia’s. “Remember how we were gonna do this in a cold basement, with a Biology textbook, by candlelight?”

Lydia nods, her mouth compressed into a thin line. Her face is red, her eyes are wide, and her hairline is dotted with sweat. “This way is better.”

“Yeah.” Stiles wipes her damp hair back from her forehead. “This way is much better.”

It’s also kind of crowded. Instead of just Stiles, Lydia has a doctor and a nurse, and Jackson and, because Jackson’s stress levels are pushing him closer and closer to wolfing out, Derek is on hand to keep him settled with the occasional reminder about anchors, and the more frequent warning growl.

Lydia squeezes his hand. Hard.

“Ow!”

“Derek says I’m not allowed to hold Jackson’s hand in case I squeeze too hard and he goes all _grr_.”

“Derek’s a lying liar who lies,” Stiles tells her, flashing a grin at the unimpressed beta. “He just knows I’m tougher than Jackson.”

“And I’m tougher than you,” Lydia says, grimacing.

“I know you are,” he tells her.

For months he’s been terrified of this day, and he knows Lydia has been as well, but it’s okay. There’s a doctor here, and a nurse, and _Jackson_. Stiles had focussed on the practicalities of getting the baby safely out of Lydia, not on the emotional fallout. They’d never talked much about that, but Stiles couldn’t even imagine how heartbreaking it must have been for her, facing the birth of her baby without Jackson by her side.

He’s here now though, and taking as much of her pain as the doctor and the nurse will allow. If it was up to Jackson, Lydia would be so stoned out of her skull on magical werewolf mojo she wouldn’t even know what planet she was on. But the doctor says she needs to be lucid enough to feel when to push. And, to the doctor’s credit, he doesn’t even take a step back when Jackson’s flashes his eyes gold and shows his fangs.

That was when Derek was brought in.

It takes _hours_ , and Stiles spends those hours alternating between weariness and mild panic. He and Jackson takes turns sitting with Lydia. When it’s Stiles’s turn for a break he walks up and down the hallway stretching until his back cracks.

It’s night.

Stiles walks to the window at the end of the hallway and looks out over the remains of the town. It’s too dark to see anything, and there’s nothing to see anyway. But there will be, soon. Lydia and Jackson’s baby is going to grow up with a future.

Stiles and the Nemeton are going to make sure of it.

The night drags on.

Flora Martin-Whittemore is born at dawn, and Stiles is the third person who gets to hold her, after Lydia and Jackson.

“Flora?” he asks, clearing his throat.

She’s weird and red and squishy and kind of gross. She’s also amazing.

Lydia looks at a random cluster of daisies poking out a hole in the wall. “It seemed appropriate.”

Stiles laughs softy, afraid of startling Flora, and the daisies turn their faces toward him.

 

***

 

Stiles yawns and stretches as he makes his way back to the room he shares with his dad. He heads into the stairwell, the doors snicking shut behind him, and yawns again as he uses the handrail to drag himself up the stairs. He rounds the corner, and finds himself face-to-face with Peter.

Stiles is awake suddenly, his heart thumping fast.

Peter pushes himself off the wall he’s been leaning against, and smirks. “At times like this, I wish I smoked. For dramatic effect.”

Stiles opens his mouth, but discovers he’s struck as dumb as he was the first time he met the alpha. He feels the same frisson of fear as well, as though the past week or so of distance between them has reset his flight or fight responses back to their hair trigger. Like his body doesn’t remember why he shouldn’t be afraid.

“You look tired, little rabbit,” Peter says. He lifts his nose, and Stiles wonders how much his scent tells him. He wonders if Flora smells half of Lydia and half of Jackson—at least Jackson when he was a human—or if she smells of something entirely new and unique. Peter clicks his tongue. “You need to get some sleep.”

Stiles curls his fingers into loose fists, suddenly afraid that this closeness between them is the same as falling into an old habit, and that any moment now he’ll bare his throat for the alpha. Bare everything else too.

His face burns, but it’s not just embarrassment.

“Little rabbit?” Peter stares at him intently. “Stiles?”

“I have to go,” Stiles says, swallowing.

He grips the rail tightly and hauls himself up the steps.

 

***

 

“You need to leave him alone, Peter,” Chris says, levering himself very carefully out of the chair by the window.

Peter glares at him, and lifts his upper lip in a silent growl.

“Leave him,” Chris repeats. “Please.”

 

***

 

His dad isn’t stupid. Stiles definitely remembers that from when he was growing up, and couldn’t catch a break. Well, he caught a lot of breaks, he guesses, it’s just that he didn’t catch them for long. His dad always _knew_. Always. Stiles managed to guess the password on the cable TV when he was nine—for pay per view wrestling, he swears—and holy god what were those naked people _doing_? And his dad knew, the second he got home, although that might have been the still-traumatized look haunting Stiles’s face. So it’s no surprise at all when Stiles sits through a meeting about the food supply, leg jiggling, only to have his dad take him aside afterward.

“Anything we need to talk about, son?”

And Stiles knows immediately that he’s been caught looking over at Chris and Peter, watching every little touch that passes between them instead of listening to Derek talk about chickens.

“No,” he attempts anyway.

John gives him the same sceptical look he’s been giving him since the moment he was born. “Kiddo, I need to know. Is my working with them going to be a problem for you? Because if it is, I’ll step down right now.”

“No! You’re…” Stiles shakes his head. “You’re the _sheriff_ , Dad. We need that. We need you.”

“Forget the we,” John says. “Just for a second. What do _you_ need?”

“I need you to be the sheriff too,” Stiles tells him. “You remember how after Mom died and you were on night shift, I’d stay over at Scott’s place? Sometimes I used to get scared when I had to go downstairs to get a drink of water in the middle of the night, because it wasn’t my house and, I don’t know, I guess that’s all it took to be scared back then. But I used to tell myself it was okay, because you were out there looking after the whole town, and you were still keeping me safe.”

John’s smile is a little rueful.

“I don’t hate them.” Stiles closes his eyes. “They made me feel safe too, in a crazy sort of way. Not—God, I’m not comparing them to you. Gross. I didn’t hate it, I mean, not all of it, and I don’t hate them. It worked. For whatever it was, it worked.”

John puts his arms around him.

It’s easier to mumble all this into John’s shoulder than it is to say it with his eyes open. “I was _important_. I was like this tether between them, and now they don’t need that anymore.” He half-laughs. “How fucked up is that?”

John rubs his back. “I don’t like them,” he says at last. “But you and me, we’re always going to feel very differently about what happened, and that’s okay. But you’re still very young, kiddo, and I think that you’re a little messed up over everything.”

“Yeah.” Stiles agrees into his dad’s collar.

“So how about this?” John leans back so that he can meet Stiles’s gaze. “How about whatever happens, I’m here for you? How about you remember that nobody has the right to make you feel small? You’re the spark, Stiles. You’re the one who woke the Nemeton. You deserve to walk into every room in this place with your head held high, because you’re _incredible_. You are much stronger than you think, so fuck those guys, right?”

Stiles snorts out a laugh.

“Fuck ’em,” John repeats.

“Is this a pep talk, or a recommendation?” Stiles asks.

“Jesus Christ,” John mutters, and pulls him into another hug. “My son.”

 

***

 

It’s late when Stiles finds himself lingering in the hallway outside Chris’s room. There’s no sound from inside. The low murmuring of voices stopped the second Stiles reached the door. And now it’s been excruciating minutes, and Stiles hasn’t got the courage to knock.

At last the door opens, and Chris is standing there, looking rumpled and stubbly in a way that makes Stiles’s stomach flip.

“Stiles,” he says. “Can I help you with something?”

“Um,” Stiles says. “I was just… um.”

“Stiles?”

“No, sorry.” Stiles jams his hands in his pockets. “I was just… and you guys are busy or whatever. So.”

Chris nods.

At that moment the door is wrenched open further, and Peter stares out at him. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Stiles, Chris and I aren’t fucking. We haven’t since we were teenagers.”

Chris levels him a narrow look.

“What?” Stiles asks. “Why?”

Chris clears his throat. “That’s not really something—”

“Shut up, Chris,” Peter says, his eyes flashing red as he turns his gaze on Stiles. “Because, sweetheart, something is missing. Any idea what that might be?”

_What?_

“Come inside, Stiles,” Peter tells him, his voice low. He takes Chris by the arm and pulls him back.

Stiles stares at the open door for a moment, his heart pounding in his chest.

Then he walks inside the room, and closes the door behind him.

 


	29. Chapter 29

Stiles’s heart is beating as loud as a drum when he steps inside the room and closes the door, and his scent is spiced with anxiety.

“Come here, little rabbit,” Peter says, keeping the growl out of his voice. He holds his hand out. This is an entreaty, not a demand. Stiles steps closer. His fingers brush against Peter’s and Peter takes his hand. Lifts it in his own, and turns it, and presses his nose against the soft skin of the inside of Stiles’s wrist. Stiles’s pulse picks up, and his scent sharpens. Arousal this time. Peter inhales deeply, and lets his eyes bleed red. “Good boy.”

Stiles huffs at that, flushes, but doesn’t pull his hand away.

Peter uses his free hand to push the sleeve of Stiles’s hoodie up, exposing the pale flesh of his arm. He nuzzles along it until his nose is pushed into the crease of Stiles’s elbow, and Stiles is biting his lip.

“You smell so good,” Peter tells him. “So sweet and ripe.”

“Gross.” Stiles pulls his arm back, and meets Peter’s startled gaze. “I’m not a _apple_ , asshole.” He tugs his hoodie off, leaving his hair standing at odd angles.

“Not even a peach?” Peter teases.

“Not even,” Stiles shoots back. He lifts his chin. “And I’m not a little rabbit either.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Peter says, smirking. “You’ll have to pry that one from my cold, dead hands.”

Stiles tilts his head. “I could probably manage that.”

Chris’s room is largely free of tendrils and vines, but the few clinging to the walls by the window shiver and shudder.

Peter’s heart skips a startled beat, and then he laughs. “You are _magnificent_.”

Chris clears his throat. “We should talk.”

And just like that there’s a cold bucket of water thrown over everyone.

_Talk?_

Fuck Chris, seriously.

 

***

 

Stiles rounds on Chris. “No,” he says firmly.

Chris raises his eyebrows. “No?”

“I don’t want to talk,” Stiles says. “I don’t want to hear your excuses, or your apologies. I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry, that you didn’t know that I was a real live boy back then but now it’s somehow _different_.”

Chris tries not to flinch at the words.

“It was what it was,” Stiles says, his expression softening. “You got something you wanted, and I got something I wanted. That’s how it was. But let me tell you something, _Major_. I’m worth a lot more than a ration pack, and that’s not something I’m going to forget. Never again.”

Chris nods.

Stiles regards him silently for a moment, and then tugs his thin t-shirt off, revealing the planes of his chest, the dip of his abdomen, and the thin trail of dark hair that runs from his belly button down into his jeans. His chest expands as he breathes, and Chris can’t tear his gaze away. He can’t quite read the look in Stiles’s eyes. He can’t tell if Stiles wants him to step closer, or he’ll hit him if he does. There’s a challenge in that dark gaze though. There always has been.

Peter isn’t so reticent. He steps up behind Stiles and slides a hand around him from behind. Splays his fingers over Stiles’s sternum, and nuzzles into the back of his neck. Stiles’s eyes slide half-shut, but he’s still holding Chris’s gaze. Peter’s other hand appears, and then vanishes into the waistband of Stiles’s jeans.

Stiles jerks as Peter cups his dick, and Chris is suddenly hard too. Peter flashes him a knowing grin.

Asshole.

“What do you say, Stiles?” Peter asks, his voice low. “Shall we show Chris how I scented you all those times?”

A bright flush appears on Stiles’s face, and on his throat and chest as he squirms in Peter’s grasp.

Chris holds his breath.

“Okay,” Stiles says. “Let’s show him.”

 

***

 

Stiles isn’t sure of the dynamics here. He isn’t sure if he and Peter are punishing Chris, or if Chris is doing it himself. Or maybe they’re rewarding him? Stiles has no idea, but whatever they’re doing has got his dick already leaking into his underwear—into Peter’s hand—so he’s just going to go with what feels good and worry about everything else later.

He’s owed that, right?

He thinks he is.

He needs to draw a line in the sand. Needs to put everything that happened before above that line, and make sure it doesn’t bleed down into the space underneath where he’s writing his future. And maybe that’s possible and maybe that’s not how it will work after all, but he wants to try. He wants to start again. And maybe he even wants these two assholes with him while he does it.

Maybe that’s a thing that can work too.

He toes off his shoes, and shoves his jeans and underwear down, and Peter growls very close in his ear, and then pushes him down onto the bed. And then Peter’s naked too, and that’s a first, and he somehow looks more like a predator now in all that skin that he does when he flashes his fangs. Stiles breathes shallowly, squirming when Peter climbs onto the bed between his legs.

“Remember this?” Peter asks, shuffling back on his knees. Before Stiles can ask what, his large, warm hands are spreading Stiles’s thighs and then pushing his legs up and apart. Stiles hardly has time to give a yelp of surprise before Peter’s hot tongue is pressing against his hole.

Holy _fuck_.

It’s obscene. Just…the noises alone are lewd and _awful_. Slurping and sucking and squelching, but Stiles can’t do anything except twist his fingers in Peter’s hair and urge him deeper. His tongue is _inside_ , and even worse than the noises Peter is making are the ones being pulled out of Stiles: _uh uh uh_. His dick is so hard it hurts, and he’s trying to clench on Peter’s tongue, and it’s completely overwhelming, but at the same time it’s not _enough_. Stiles knows he must be bright red and ugly, knows he must look ridiculous like this, but he can’t stop himself from turning his head to look at Chris.

Chris looks like a man having a religious experience, half joyous and half fearful.

Stiles laughs, except it comes out like a moan as Peter digs a finger in beside his tongue. “Peter. _Alpha_.”

Peter growls, and the sound rumbles through Stiles, reverberating like a shockwave, making him shiver and jerk.

Peter pulls away for a second. “Lube,” he says, and then he’s delving back into Stiles’s ass.

Stiles gasps, squirming and rocking and needing more. He dimly sees Chris moving around the bed, and then the lube is being dropped onto the sheets. Stiles blinks, and tears blur his vision, because it feels so fucking _good_. The world tips briefly, and Stiles finds himself on his hands and knees, one of Peter’s hands curled around his hip.

“Can I fuck you, Stiles?” Peter asks, voice low and a little ragged at the edges.

“Yes,” Stiles says. He sags forward, pillowing his head on his crossed arms. “Do it.”

Peter slides two lube-slick fingers into Stiles’s ass.

“I said do it!” Stiles moans.

He almost comes when Peter pushes his dick inside him.

 

***

 

Chris watches from the chair by the window. He doesn’t know if he should be jealous or not. And, if he should, which one of them he should direct that jealousy at. Because yes, he wants Stiles again. Wants him more than oxygen. But he also remembers what it feels like to be impaled on Peter’s dick, to have the werewolf driving into him from behind. His dick is so hard he’s afraid to touch it. Afraid he’ll come in seconds.

Peter thrusts gently into Stiles at first, and then picks up the pace. Stiles is making those breathy grunts again: _uh uh uh_. Peter hooks his arms around Stiles’s chest and straightens them both up. Stiles’s face is red, his mouth hanging open, his eyes glazed. He looks wrecked. His body is shining with sweat, and his dick is red and angry, each of Peter’s thrusts making the head push out a little precum. They slide down the shaft like tears, glistening, and Chris’s mouth waters in response.

Peter keeps one arm splayed on Stiles’s chest, and the other curled around his hip. His eyes glow red as he thrusts. Stiles’s head is thrown back, the long expanse of his neck exposed to the alpha. He lifts one arm and reaches behind him. He grips Peter’s hair roughly.

They both moan in tandem.

Chris shifts in the chair. His dick is throbbing, aching.

Peter reaches down and strokes Stiles’s dick, and that’s all it takes for Stiles. He shakes and jerks, come streaking his stomach, dribbling down Peter’s fingers. He slumps back against Peter, eyes closed.

Peter thrusts a few more times, and then he’s coming as well, growling roughly.

“More, little rabbit?” he asks, and Stiles blinks at him dozily and nods.

Then Peter’s on his feet, lifting Stiles, and carrying him across the floor toward Chris. Chris unzips his pants, his dick jutting out, and Stiles is in his lap, his limbs loose and warm. He groans as he sinks down onto Chris’s dick.

It’s slow this time. Peter kneels behind Stiles, guiding his hips. Rocking him gently on Chris’s dick.

Stiles leans forward and puts his arms around Chris’s neck. Chris is breathless. Stiles kisses him. A soft, sweet kiss, as Peter helps him ride Chris’s dick.

“Can you come again, sweetheart?” Peter asks.

Stiles sucks in a breath. “Y-yeah?”

Peter reaches around him and tweaks a nipple, and Stiles gasps in surprise and tightens hard on Chris’s dick. Chris kisses him again, and drops a hand between them to work Stiles’s dick. It takes Stiles longer to come this time. The ride is slower, but it’s deep. Stiles is so hot, so tight. His mouth is kiss-bitten, his eyes dark.

When he comes again it’s with a small cry of surprise.

Chris tumbles over the edge after him.

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t remember getting back onto the bed. He thinks that maybe Peter carried him. He dozes in Chris’s arms, Peter pressed behind him at first. And then Peter unpeels himself from Stiles’s back, and shifts down the bed. Hot breath hits Stiles’s ass.

“Gross,” he mumbles, but spreads his legs for the alpha.

He falls asleep between them.

 


	30. Chapter 30

Stiles wakes up to the sound of the shower in the bathroom. He squints, the sunlight catching in his lashes. He stretches, and blinks himself awake. Chris is sitting in the chair by the window, wearing just a pair of khaki track pants.

“First time you’ve ever stayed the night,” Chris says with a rueful smile, crinkles appearing around the corners of his blue-gray eyes. “Through choice.”

Stiles hums. He aches all over, and he’s too tired for this conversation, he thinks, whatever conversation this is. “I meant what I said last night, Chris. I don’t need an apology. I don’t need some sort of promise or a declaration. I don’t need a happy ending.” He sits, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. “I just need a new beginning.”

From inside the bathroom, the shower is turned off.

Chris tilts his head a little. “A new beginning?”

“I’ve drawn a line in the sand,” Stiles says. He stands, muscles aching, and stoops down to collect his jeans. He steps into them. “You need to figure out where to draw yours.”

Chris regards him silently.

Stiles sits down on the bed again, shaking out his t-shirt. The fabric is thin and soft. He tugs it over his head.

“I don’t deserve you,” Chris says at last, quietly.

This, Stiles thinks, is the crux of it.

Stiles thinks of the county fair his parents took him to when he was little. He thinks about the rows of bright plush toys lined up in all the booths, just waiting to be won, and wonders if that’s how Chris sees him. Not an object, not exactly, but a _prize_. Maybe not a cheap prize like those plush toys that split apart within a few weeks, spilling beans everywhere, but a prize like at the end of a quest in a fairytale, or a video game. The sort of thing that has to be hard-won. Stiles wants to tell him that he’s no prize. He’s no cheap pink-pawed bear smiling cheerily down from a shelf in a fairground booth, seams about to burst. Maybe Chris really does believe, or wants to believe, in a world where people who try to do good are rewarded somehow, and that people who have done bad things can only expect bad endings. Maybe, in some ways, Chris is more of an idealist than Stiles ever has been.

That seems very strange.

“Maybe you _don’t_ deserve me,” Stiles says at last. He turns his head to discover Peter leaning in the bathroom doorway, a towel slung around his hips and droplets of water gleaming on his skin. “But it’s not just up to you. This is _my_ choice.”

Peter smiles.

“I woke the Nemeton,” Stiles says. “I’m not _nothing_. I get to choose.”

Chris opens his mouth and closes it again.

Stiles walks over to Chris and leans down. The pads of his fingers rasp against his stubble.

“Do you want this?” Stiles asks, voice barely a whisper. He thinks of all the times Chris could have hurt him, and didn’t. He thinks of how he had to try so hard to hate him and how, in the end, it was easier to hate himself. Such a mess. Such a fucking mess.

“Yes. I want this.” Chris’s voice is hardly more than a whisper.

Stiles brushes his lips against Chris’s. “Then earn it.”

He breaks the kiss, and turns around to collect his shoes and hoodie. He bundles them up against his chest, and detours toward Peter on his way to the door.

“See you later, little rabbit,” Peter murmurs.

Their kiss is as brief and fleeting as the one with Chris, and Stiles relaxes a fraction. Maybe it’s not going to be one-upmanship and dick measuring between Peter and Chris all the time. Maybe that’s just a front.

Peter reaches up and tug a twist of Stiles’s hair gently.

“Thank you,” he whispers, leaning close. “He needed to hear that.”

Stiles’s heart flutters, and he heads for the door.

 

***

 

“I’m a work in progress,” Stiles mumbles to his dad when he finally drags himself back to the room they’ve been sharing.

“You’re something, alright,” John says, brows arched. “Need me to find a way to kill anyone?”

Stiles curls up on his mattress, yawning. “Not yet.”

 

***

 

The trucks rumble into town a little after noon. The day is overcast and cold, but that doesn’t stop a small crowd gathering in the parking lot of the hospital. Parrish is amongst them. He’s not expecting to know anyone getting off the trucks, but he’s interested in the supplies the outside government has promised them. Food and medicine first of all, and they’ll start pushing for more soon. It’s a strange kind of reputation they’re earning in the outside world. The government seems to be publically playing it like they’re willing to help the hungry, misguided townsfolk. Except, Parrish knows from history—hell, the whole world must know it—they’d get nothing but bloodshed if the government wasn’t legitimately intimidated.

Beacon Hills is the mouse that roared.

“Let’s keep it orderly, folks,” John calls as the trucks rumble into view.

John’s still wearing the orange coveralls from the camp, but he’s got the bearing of a sheriff. And he point blank refused Major Argent’s offer to help himself to a uniform from the military Q-store.

“This only works if I don’t look like one of you,” he’d said, and borrowed a needle and thread instead, to stitch up a hole in the knee of his pants.

When things settle, Parrish thinks, he’ll quit the military and work alongside John instead. Every sheriff needs a deputy.

“Let’s move back, people,” Parrish calls. “Give them some room to pull in. Last thing we need is for someone to get run over.”

John claps him on the shoulder.

 

***

 

Stiles snuffles awake. He can hear a dull rumbling sound in the distance. It takes him a moment to realize what it is: trucks. He clambers up from his mattress, wincing slightly at the ache in his muscles. He heads out, and meets Scott in the stairwell. Scott sniffs, and then his eyes widen and he opens his mouth.

“Don’t even,” Stiles warns him, feeling his face burn.

Scott shows him a lopsided grin as they head down the stairs together. When they head outside into the parking lot, Scott heads over toward the pack. Stiles has noticed it’s instinctual in his best friend now, and it’s hard not to feel a little jealous? Stiles has seen Scott roughhousing with Boyd and Isaac and Erica, and even Derek, and it looks kind of fun. And not at all like the roughhousing Stiles gets from _his_ wolf.

And now he’s blushing again.

He waves at his dad, then jams his hands in his pockets and shuffles over toward the pack. Lydia’s there, with Flora wrapped up in a blanket against the chill weather. She’s wearing one of the onesies that Chris ordered all those weeks ago. It’s a little jarring.

“Uncle Stiles,” Lydia says, and bundles Flora into his arms.

“Unfair,” Stiles says. “What if I wanted to hug you too?”

Lydia laughs softly and leans into him. She slides an arm around him, and they watch the approaching trucks.

 

***

 

Derek keeps near the front of the pack when the trucks pull in. Mostly because he’s representing the Hale pack here because Peter is… well, who the hell knows what Peter’s doing? Point is, it’s up to Derek to set an example for the others. To show the humans that they aren’t mindless, vicious animals.

Which is why, when the people start climbing out of the first truck, and Scott suddenly lets loose a bellow and starts running for them, Derek’s first instinct is to reach out and try to grab him.

He catches him by the wrist and tugs him back but Scott hardly seems to notice. His disbelieving gaze is fixed on a dark-haired woman in a medic’s uniform who is looking around at the devastation with her hand over her mouth.

“Mom?” Scott calls out, eyes wide. “ _Mom_!”

Derek lets him go, stunned.

Their reunion is surpassed only by the one that occurs when a young guy in a uniform jumps warily down from one of the other trucks.

“Danny!” Jackson exclaims.

The guy turns, jaw dropping. “Jackson?”

There’s some unidentifiable emotion somewhere deep inside Derek that bubbles suddenly to the surface. It’s a kind of sweet melancholy, he thinks. Derek would never begrudge them this, but at the same time it’s a little hard to watch, knowing there’s no miracle on those trucks for him.

Cora worms her way under his arm, and flashes him a knowing smile.

Derek presses a kiss to the top of her head.

 

***

 

Chris is halfway through drafting a media release when his door is suddenly flung open.

“You conscripted my friend Danny, you asshole,” Stiles announces, and throws a shoe at his head.

Chris dodges it easily, lifting his laptop out of the range of fire. “What’s worse? My conscripting your friends, or Peter biting them?”

Stiles collects his shoe and tucks it under his arm. “Why does it have to be one or the other? You couldn’t have just left us alone?”

“He’s got a point, Dad,” Allison says from the chat window on the laptop, and Chris takes a moment to enjoy the way that Stiles just _freezes_.

Chris turns the laptop around. “Allison, meet Stiles. Stiles, Allison.”

Stiles is as wide-eyed as a gecko. “Um, hey,” he says at last, and gives the laptop a small wave, and then vanishes again.

“I think I spooked him,” Allison says when Chris turns the laptop around again.

“I think _I_ did.”

They run through the media release a few more times before Allison is satisfied with it.

“I’ll send it off tonight,” she promises.

“Are you okay?” Chris asks her. “I mean this whole thing… You must be copping hell for it, I mean. Now that I’m a traitor.”

Allison raises her eyebrows. “I can handle myself, Dad. Besides, you can use someone here, making sure someone is telling your side of the story.”

“Hearts and minds,” Chris scoffs.

“Don’t underestimate it, Dad,” Allison tells him sternly.

“Just remember you’re welcome here” Chris tells her. “If things get too rough in Washington. And even if they don’t. Even if you just want to visit.”

“Okay.” She smiles, dimples appearing. “Love you, Dad.”

“Love you,” Chris echoes. He closes the laptop and heads outside, hoping Stiles hasn’t got too far. And hoping—and expecting—to find Peter with him when he finally finds him.


	31. Chapter 31

Stiles, it turns out, gets flustered when people ask him about the Nemeton or, worse, try to thank him for it. Peter finds it amusing. Chris finds it endearing. Chris doesn’t understand much about this spark business, but he thinks the Nemeton couldn’t have picked a better… _host_? Vessel?

“Amplifier,” Stiles says with a smile. He picks up a crystal of some sort from Deaton’s desk and holds it up to the light. “It kind of refracts through me?”

“Your lack of a standardized education is showing, little rabbit,” Peter comments with a smirk.

Stiles huffs, and twists the crystal so the light hits Peter in the eyes. Peter flinches back.

“Leave him alone, Peter,” Chris says.

“Me?” Peter shoots them both a wounded look. “I’m the one he almost blinded!”

Stiles grins.

“Mr Stilinski,” Deaton says, sweeping into the room. “What have we said about picking up random artefacts?”

Stiles sets the crystal down quickly, and jams his hands into his pockets. “We said I should definitely stop doing that.”

Chris smiles fondly, and tugs Stiles closer by the belt loops of his jeans, safely out of reach of Deaton’s desk. Stiles presses back against him, and turns his head slightly. Chris sees a flash of a smile, and a flush staining his cheeks before Stiles grips Chris’s hands and sets them firmly on his abdomen.

It’s not quite a public display of affection, given that it’s only Deaton here, but Chris discovers that he likes the possessiveness of the gesture. He likes the feeling that Stiles is his. He likes the feeling that Stiles has made that decision for himself even more.

Peter saunters over to them. Lifts his chin and scents the air, and smiles.

Stiles squirms, and the leaves on the vines poking through the ceiling panels shudder.

Deaton has the decency to pretend not to notice what’s going on. He sets a book down on his desk and very pointedly does not look at the three of them.

“Um, okay,” Stiles says. “Thanks for the lesson, Doc. See you tomorrow!”

He drags Chris and Peter from the room.

 

***

 

John was so sure that everything was lost, that he’d never even imagined a day like this one. His fantasies were never that cruel. Back then he’d only dreamed of dying. He’d never dared dream of seeing Stiles alive, grown, sitting on the old hospital wheelchair ramp in the sunlight, Scott by his side. The Hale pack is squeezed in around them, Jackson and Lydia sitting in front of them. Stiles keeps leaning forward to peer over Lydia’s shoulder at Flora, making silly faces at her, and John’s chest tightens every time he does.

His son.

His stubborn, big-hearted, courageous son, who did what he had to do to provide for the people he loves. John’s seen the high school basement. Seen where Stiles and Lydia huddled up every night, the only two left out of their little group.

His _impossible_ son.

John can’t say he’s going to be welcoming Chris Argent and Peter Hale into the family with open arms any time soon, but Stiles is happy and it turns out that’s all John needs to sleep at night. A part of John is always going to see Stiles as the ten-year-old boy he told to run that day, but at the same time he recognizes that his son isn’t a child anymore. And John discovers that he respects the young man his son has grown into enough to shut his damn mouth when it comes to the choice he’s made.

John watches Stiles as he laughs, his head thrown back and the sunlight gleaming on his skin.

This is a miracle.

John smiles as Stiles pulls Scott into a half-hearted headlock.

Stiles survived. Stiles is happy.

A miracle.

John thinks of Claudia. She’d be so proud of their boy.

 

***

 

“More people are going to come, aren’t they?” Stiles asks later, opening one of Deaton’s books.

Deaton takes it off him and snaps it closed. He shows Stiles a gentle smile. “We have always been a Beacon, Stiles. Now, more than ever, we’re shining in the darkness.”

 

***

 

It’s been a long time since Peter ran in the Preserve. The temptation to shift into his wolf form is strong, but Peter resists. He lifts his nose to chase down the familiar scents of his territory: the loam, the damp, the pine and the maple and the alder. Territory. _Home_.

Yes, Peter tells himself he’s allowed to think of it so tenderly now that he doesn’t actually have to make himself a bed of moss and bracken every night. That’s a concept that’s more romantic in fairy tales than in reality. Not that Peter ever had a bed of moss and bracken. He was more of a pile of dead leaves kind of guy.

Peter loves his territory—the knowledge of it, the very existence of it, thrums in the blood in his veins—but it’s much easier to love from the comfort of an actual bed. In a room with walls and a ceiling. Maybe one day he’ll build a house out here again.

After he helps rebuild the town, perhaps.

He threads through the trees, keeping Stiles in his sight. Stiles is wearing a bright red hoodie. His breath hangs like mist in front of his face on every exhale. The day is cold. It’s colder inside the Preserve than in the hospital. The dips and hollows of the ground hold the chill for longer. In some parts of the Preserve, the sunlight never touches the ground. It’s winter, and Peter wants to laugh at the incongruity of it all. Winter, and pennywort is growing in tiny clusters from the cracks in a fallen log. Winter, and the air is sharp with the scent of wild ginger. Winter, and a clump of stringy dandelions dance in the breeze.

“It’s been a while, huh?” Chris asks him in an undertone as they follow Stiles through the trees.

“You, me, and the woods,” Peter says. “And a little rabbit.”

The light makes Chris’s eyes look more blue than gray. “I’ll look after this one too,” he says.

“I’ll hold you to that, Christopher,” Peter tells him.

It will be no hardship at all.

 

***

 

Stiles can hear the Nemeton calling him. It’s as loud as he remembers from the night he woke it, or it woke him. He can hear the roots of the plants and trees digging into the earth. He can hear the roar of sap in the trunks of the trees, as loud as the roar of the ocean. Each leaf that twists in the wind has its own voice.

It’s incredible.

Stiles blinks, and follows the tendrils of faint green light that marks out a path through the Preserve.

The Nemeton is calling him.

Stiles breaks into a run as he gets closer, and then he crests a low rise, scrambles down a moss-covered slope, and he sees it.

It’s massive.

It’s a stump, cut off low to the ground, and Stiles feels a stab of pain and horror. Who could do a thing like that? Who could cut down a tree that must have been so magnificent? The stump must be ten or twelve feet in diameter. The surface is weathered and cracked, but it’s not dead. No. It’s very much alive.

Stiles can _feel_ it.

He sucks a shuddering breath into his lungs, and steps forward. He approaches slowly, eyes wide to drink everything in. When he reaches the edge of the stump he stops and drops down onto his haunches. Reaches out his hands and places them on the surface of the Nemeton.

“Hi,” he murmurs.

Stiles sees the faint green light rising from the cracks in the surface of the stump.

He laughs suddenly, and climbs onto the stump.

“You’re much bigger than I thought you were,” he whispers, and the Nemeton whispers back.

 

***

 

The roots of the Nemeton go all the way through the earth.

Stiles sees the paths they make.

He follows them, twisted and tangled, and learns every one in the space of a single heartbeat. It’s right on the sharp edge of too much; Stiles is afraid he doesn’t have the capacity to see these things, to know them. He’s afraid his spark will be extinguished in this sudden flood of images, of sensations, of knowledge.

But if he stumbles a little, he doesn’t fall.

He won’t.

The Nemeton reveals itself to him, and it’s so full of life that Stiles comes up from its grasp crying.

 

***

 

“Stiles!”

Stiles sucks in a choking breath and sits bolt upright to find Chris and Peter kneeling on either side of him. Then, suddenly dizzy, he lies back down and blinks up at the sky for a moment.

“Can you hear it?” he asks.

“Hear what?” Chris’s voice is sharp with worry.

“Can you hear how deep it goes?” Stiles looks between them, and laughs.

“Little rabbit?”

Stiles sits up again. “The Nemeton,” he says. “The roots… they go through the earth. There are others. It’s not a single tree. It’s a _network_.” He laughs, and strokes his fingers along the surface of the stump. “We can make other places like Beacon Hills.”

Stiles reaches out and grabs Peter by the shirtfront. Pulls him closer.

“We can give other people what we have, Peter.”

He brushes his lips against Peter’s, then reaches for Chris. Their kiss is just as soft, as fleeting.

“Chris, I can _do_ this.”

Chris’s mouth quirks up in a smile. “I believe you.”

There are no fairy tales, Stiles thinks, whatever he used to believe. There are no happy endings. There are no endings at all. Only beginnings.

He runs his hands over the surface of the Nemeton, and daisies unfurl from out of the cracks, waving in the breeze like tiny banners.

It’s a new beginning.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who joined me on this crazy ride!  
> See you next time!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [(PODFIC) Strays by Discontented Winter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13635108) by [AvidReaderLady](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvidReaderLady/pseuds/AvidReaderLady)




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